Suicide Watch on the Gulf Coast

Posted on August 23, 2007 in Disasters Suicide

More and more survivors of Hurricane Katrina are thinking of suicide as nothing to little is done to patch things up after the catastrophe.

The survey is a follow-up to one done six months after the hurricane, which found that few people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama – about 3 percent – had contemplated suicide in the storm’s aftermath.

That figure has now doubled in the three-state area and is up to 8 percent in the New Orleans area, according to Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School, lead researcher for the Hurricane Katrina Community Advisory Group.

More people also showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, 21 percent of those interviewed this year compared to 16 percent in the earlier survey.

It’s not surprising, said Karen Binder-Brynes, a New York psychologist who specializes in PTSD.

“It’s a community that’s in terrible distress. It’s not like other things where, once everything’s over, everything’s getting rebuilt,” she said.

Kessler team interviewed 1,000 people last year and was able to track down 800 of them for this year’s survey. The latest survey is not yet ready for publication, but Kessler said the preliminary results for suicide and PTSD were striking.

Kessler said that in the months after the Aug. 29, 2005 hurricane, an underlying optimism protected many people from suicidal thoughts. Now, that optimism has worn thin – something the earlier report warned could happen if rebuilding didn’t keep pace with expectations.

The next move in the continual shell game of disaster relief will undoubtably come from administation apologists who will have a word or two to say about these expectations: look for the word “unrealistic” to hit your local spin doctor’s fax machine soon.