Hurricane Katrina and PTSD

Hurricane Katrina destroyed many things: homes, schools, families, and hearts. In Dave Egger’s book Zeitoun he explained one families journey through this natural disaster and the lasting affects it had on their psyches. Zeitoun and Kathy, the leaders of the Zeitoun family, both suffered from some version of post traumatic stress disorder. Post traumatic stress disorder, commonly known as PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can occur after someone experiences a traumatic event that caused intense fear, helplessness, or horror.

There are four key symptoms of PTSD: reliving the event, avoiding situations that remind you of the event, feeling numb, and feeling keyed up. These factors can vary in intensity and make living a normal life extremely hard for a victim of this disorder. People with PTSD can often experience hopelessness, shame and despair and consequently become depressed or develop anxiety, alcohol or drug problems.

Both Zeitoun and Kathy exemplified symptoms of PTSD. Zeitoun had a hard time sleeping; he would stay up late thinking about people and places that have been burned into his brain from that horrible month after Hurricane Katrina. He also said that he would try to avoid driving past the Claiborne house and Greyhound Station because they held bad memories and feelings for him. Kathy had a difficult time as well, she ended up loosing basic cognitive functions like not being able to understand English, loosing feeling in her hands, memory loss, and anxiety.

One of the largest misconceptions of PTSD is that symptoms manifest immediately after a traumatic event. In many cases, it takes a month or two before symptoms are noticeable. They are usually brought forth by stress and/or old memories. Kathy and Zeitoun had a month of high stress and anxiety after the hurricane but did not feel the PTSD effects until a short time after that. Although this couple has shown signs of PTSD and is currently living in the remnants of New Orleans, the center of the disaster, neither of them has sought help.

Hurricane Katrina affected everyone. There is common social theory that exclaims that every person in the world can be connected to any other person in the world by six people, hence its name, six degrees of separation. This theory just proves my point further that this one disaster was able to affect all of America. America which is one of the leading countries in this world right now was shaken up by this fast and unstoppable force. We have experienced natural disasters before but not in a while and not with this big of an affect.

1.2 million people in the northern Gulf coast from Louisiana to Alabama were evacuated under government order, the final death toll was 1,836 people, an estimated 400,000 jobs were lost, about 275,000 homes were destroyed, 705 people are reported as still missing, and it is estimated to have cost the United States a $110 billion in damages.

Now if you don't know one of those 1.2 million people then someone you know does. This event was broadcast all over the world on every media platform because of our governments failure to help fast and efficiently from the beginning. With this disaster affecting so many people Americans were sitting at the edge of their seat waiting for the news to tell them what they wanted to hear or maybe hoping that they wouldn't hear anything at all.

The physical damages that this natural disaster cost people is nothing in comparison to the psychological damages it has created. In a paper presented in 2007, professors found that PTSD was diagnosed in over 38% of the people who came into one Emergency Department facility that they were studying in New Orleans. This is more than ten times higher than the 3.6% prevalence in the general US population.

There are good treatments available for PTSD. When you have PTSD, dealing with the past can be hard. Instead of telling others how you feel, you may keep your feelings bottled up but talking with a therapist can help you get better. Cognitive behavioral therapy is one type of counseling. It appears to be the most effective type of counseling for PTSD. In cognitive therapy, your therapist helps you understand and change how you think about a trauma and its aftermath. The goal is to understand how certain thoughts about trauma cause stress and make symptoms worse. The Zeitouns obviously are not reaching out for help but it shouldn’t be the victims having to ask for help. There should be programs and people reaching out to as many of these survivors as humanly possible. With an entire city of people who have survived through a natural disaster like this one we should be stepping up and making sure that it does not effect their psychological development for the rest of their life.

Between January 1, 2011 and March 15, 2011 there has already been 11 major natural disasters.

In just three months thousands of people all over the world have died due to these natural disasters that no one can prevent or even sometimes predict. What if the next one happens to you? PTSD is not something you can prevent either but it is something you can deal with it. There are far too many people with this disorder not getting the help that they need and that needs to change now.