Katrina victims struggle mentally
By Marilyn Elias, USA TODAY
Many Gulf Coast residents still feel the wallop of Hurricane Katrina nearly two years later.
Mental illness is double the pre-storm levels, rising numbers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and there is a surge in adults who say they're thinking of suicide.
A government survey released Wednesday to USA TODAY shows no improvement in mental health from a year ago.
About 14% have symptoms of severe mental illness. An additional 20% have mild to moderate mental illness, says Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School, who led the study.
The big surprise: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which typically goes away in a year for most disaster survivors, has increased: 21% have the symptoms vs. 16% in 2006. Common symptoms include the inability to stop thinking about the hurricane, nightmares and emotional numbness.
"We're getting delayed-onset PTSD, and we're not getting any evidence of recovery," Kessler says. His team surveyed 800 Katrina survivors in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
Gulf Coast mental illness rates are much higher than typical after natural disasters, says psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, a pioneering PTSD researcher and director of The Trauma Center in Boston.
"They're expected numbers for refugee camps, for people who have lost their communities, their sense of direction, whose core issue is being uprooted," he says.
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-16-neworleans-illness_N.htm