Traumatology

Hurricane Katrina was an unprecedented event in U.S. history in terms of its impact-psychologically, emotionally and financially. The storm took its devastating toll on individuals and institutions, a toll which is still present in many ways. This paper describes the impact Katrina had on Tulane University from the immediate aftermath of the storm to the university's recovery and renewal. It also articulates the lessons learned from this experience, which Tulane found valuable in maintaining and supporting its community during the crisis.

In this article, the author describes from her personal perspective the progression and range of emotional reactions of the New Orleans community to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The article further discusses the author's observations of the facilitators and barriers to emotional recovery that have unfolded as New Orleans continues to recover as a city. Lessons learned center on (a) the longitudinal phenomenology of emotional and psychobiological stress responses in a context in which the aftermath of the initial event is characterized by a set of pronounced and enduring stressors and (b) the value of institutional and social support networks in confronting and overcoming these challenges.

This article reviews the author's experiences before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina and the impact of this experience on his personal and professional life. The article details the impact of the disaster on creating a transformative experience for the author and identifies the ways in which the experience was simultaneously horrendous and uplifting.

This paper examines the professional identity development of a graduate social work student who was on the verge of completing her degree from Tulane University just as Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. The author discusses how being a victim of the same trauma from which her clients are suffering, as well as experiencing the same emotional impact, affects the development of her role as a social worker. The author draws comparisons to social work students experiencing the terror of the second intifada as they too developed their own senses of professional identity and how their experiences affected the meaning of their profession. The author reflects on her struggle to recapture a sense of personal self once everything she knows is gone, in order to determine under which role she serves her clients as they suffer from the same loss.

There are many psychologists who provided help to others following the terrorist attack of 9/11 and the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina, but fewer who also experienced both of these tragic events first hand and also served others as a helper. This article is a personal account of a New York psychologist who endured 9/11 and then moved to Louisiana and endured Hurricane Katrina, and the personal and professional impact of these events. The unique and extremely challenging nature of the crisis work under these conditions is discussed, including techniques that seemed to be most effective for providing help to others, as well as techniques and behaviors that were helpful to the psychologist's self-care during and following these catastrophes. The relationship to broader issues in the field of psychology and mental health is also discussed, including the ethics of psychologist self-care and practical recommendations for the providers of disaster mental health services.

In this article, the author describes denial associated with living in a city threatened by hurricanes and with the events leading up to and following Hurricane Katrina. The article draws from the disaster and addictions literature to reflect on the purposes and consequences of denial. For example, denying the true danger associated with the approaching Hurricane Katrina may have been motivated by a need to view one's home as safe or a cultural belief held by a group with deep roots in New Orleans. An unfortunate consequence of extreme denial is putting oneself and one's family in harm's way. Suggested solutions focus on informing government and news agencies that make public service announcements that this resistant population exists. The author also suggests strategies that these agencies should avoid and some that may work.

As the two faculty members primarily responsible for the field education component of Tulane School of Social Work, the authors put forth their experiences of response and recovery from the trauma and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—from a personal and professional perspective. Their personal experiences are intertwined as well as uniquely individual. Professionally, this disaster affected their orientation to work and their ways of finding new paths for helping students continue their learning and recovery. The authors discuss specific efforts they made to do meaningful work as they struggled to heal themselves from the trauma they all suffered. Finally, the authors focus on the valuable lessons they have learned, and are still learning, about preparation, response, recovery, and rebuilding from trauma of this scale. These lessons are informed, shaped, and evolving through the lenses of professional and scholarly work throughout their social work careers.

After Hurricane Katrina, the author's research on Mexican migration to the United States expanded to include disaster driven migration. This new project, and life in a disaster zone, made achieving a balance between work and family even more difficult than it would normally be for a pre-tenure faculty member and mother of a young child. When the author returned to New Orleans after the evacuation, she began studying the Latino immigrants arriving there to do the construction work that was so critical to the city's recovery. She made the difficult decision to leave New Orleans in July 2007 to balance the competing demands of teaching, research, and family. In the process, she learned about academics' particular vulnerabilities and some coping strategies to manage those.

Hurricane Katrina's landfall on August 29, 2005, has had a profound affect on the lives of everyone living in coastal Louisiana and Mississippi. Leaving behind a vast swath of destruction and many dead, the storm has reshaped lives, careers, and perspectives. This article is largely a personal statement about a university professor's experience of teaching a course on Pompeii in post-Katrina New Orleans. For 6 years she has taught a course on the material culture and lives of the Romans at Pompeii. Lecturing on the destruction of that city in January 2006, less than 3 weeks after her own return to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, led her to consider what lessons might be gained from Pompeii and other past disasters. The article shares this professor's experience in teaching a freshman orientation course that attempts to understand Hurricane Katrina within a historical framework, examining past catastrophic events in urban areas and developing new approaches to the Pompeii course, linking it to the Katrina disaster and New Orleans' recovery. The author offers some brief comments on an aspect of the public discourse about Katrina, the comparison of New Orleans' disaster with the destruction of Pompeii.

The worst natural disaster in U.S. history was anything but natural for the city of New Orleans and the Tulane School of Social Work. The associate dean's account of personal and collective losses and victories in the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the broken levees in New Orleans provides social work education both confirmation of and challenges to traditional thinking about trauma, recovery, and resilience. Actual accounts of individual and organizational survival are linked to tenets of trauma responses within a framework of lessons that inform the reader on personal, practice, and teaching dimensions.

The counting method is a recently developed psychotherapy technique for resolving trauma memories. It may perform as well as the most efficient leading methods while being simple to implement and easy to teach, thus potentially enhancing dissemination of effective trauma treatment. Progressive counting represents a substantial modification of the counting method, for enhanced efficiency and client tolerance. Three cases are presented illustrating progressive counting's potential utility in treating trauma for a range of presenting problems.

This study assessed how Jewish Israeli young adults perceive the impacts of the Holocaust on themselves, their family and Israel society. The written responses of 180 respondents, 90 of which were grandchildren of Holocaust survivors (GHSs) and 90 which are not grandchildren of survivors (NGHSs), connected the Holocaust with issues of security, education and culture, and the impact, or lack of it, on family and self. These responses also suggest that NGHS relate to the Holocaust only through sociocultural mechanisms and that GHSs are influenced by the same sociocultural mechanisms, yet are also divided by the perceived impact of intergenerational processes on their personal and family lives. The overall results of the study suggest that regardless of family connection to the Holocaust, in Israel there are sociocultural mechanisms at work that impact the perception of the Holocaust on the third generation of Holocaust survivors as a cultural trauma.

This study investigates mental health and well-being variables in a randomly selected sample of Bosnian refugees. The sample was predominately female (56%), with a mean age of 42, and 56.5% were educated at 12 years of school or less with 43.5% reporting more than 12 years of education. Four standardized research instruments that measured trauma exposure, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology, complicated grief, anxiety, depression, well-being, and general mental health (a combined measure of well-being and psychological distress) were randomly disseminated among 500 Bosnian refugees with 126 (25%) surveys returned. Results revealed PTSD (66.6%), complicated grief (54%), anxiety (40%), and depression (31%) symptoms in the clinical range. A sequential regression revealed that 31% of the variance in poor general mental health was accounted for by complicated grief, whereas PTSD symptomatology only accounted for 6% of the variance. Implications for mental health interventions, research, and policy are discussed.

Unlike other instruments designed to assess DSM-IV Criterion A for posttraumatic stress disorder, exposure to a high-magnitude stressor, the Dimensions of Stressful Events (DOSE) scale assesses not different types of stressors but the specific characteristics of high-magnitude stressor events that the literature indicates increase the likelihood of posttraumatic response to the stressful event(s). This study investigated the DOSE's psychometric properties in a sample of 1,032 children aged 2 to 18 years (mean = 8.5 ± 3.9) exposed to interpersonal violence who participated in a community-based intervention. Findings indicate that the DOSE shows promise as a valid and reliable measure of the traumatic potential associated with diverse stressful experiences. Clinically, it could also be used as an indirect screening measure of the potential for the development of acute or posttraumatic stress disorder. In addition, the DOSE may allow researchers to make comparisons of the impact of different high-magnitude stressors across studies.