In the months ahead, after the physical wounds in Haiti are attended to, tremors will be felt throughout the culture as widespread psychological injuries remain.
First there will be the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a disorder than can last for months. Those fortune enough to have survived the massive earthquake may experience thoughts, dreams, and hallucinations that intrusively recall the horror of the events. Others will exhibit a kind of numbness, an inability to enjoy life and connect with others, a pattern designed to avoid thoughts that might trigger memories of the event. Now imagine those symptoms as dominant operational behaviors for an entire culture. PTSD may very well become a dysfunctional way-of-life when daily life picks up again — a shadow that will lurk behind every school teacher’s lesson, every shoppers decision, every family dinner table.
But as dismal as that may sound — and children may be greatly affected the worse by PTSD — far more heart wrenching will be the survivor’s syndrome. First identified as “survivor’s guilt” among Holocaust survivors, today the syndrome is known to affect anyone who has survived a massive catastrophic event, and is even common among emergency room personnel. It can involve anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, and emotional numbness, a loss of drive.
The insidious thing about survivor’s syndrome is it’s subtle ability to impact a family for generations. Through silent messages, glances, back turns, and distorted warnings about danger, parents and grandparents with survivors’ syndrome can unknowingly instill the idea that pleasure cannot come without pain, that pain should be expected in life, or that pleasure is not worth risking at all.
Psychological injuries will be a grim reality of future daily life in Haiti. And at this time, mental health workers are as vital to survival as the triage units on the ground today.
Tags: Post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, Survivors guilt, survivors syndrome