After trauma of Katrina woman wonders "Are the dead the lucky ones?"

New Orleans: Tranquility Lost
African America - Katrina
Wednesday, 07 November 2007
by Jarvis DeBerry

When crazy things happen to normal people, strange changes occur in their psyches. Tranquility - the feeling of security and inner peace - is shattered by unforeseen, overwhelming events, and may never return. The survivors of New Orleans are left largely alone to cope with a catastrophe whose aftermath is made even more cruel by those who gloat in, and profit by, the destruction of an American metropolis. Citizens without material resources are expected to emerge psychologically whole, when the richest nation on Earth claims it doesn't have the resources to rebuild the fundamental structures of their former lives. The question arises: who is mentally "imbalanced" - the survivors of cataclysm, or the enablers of ongoing social destruction?

New Orleans: Tranquility Lost
by Jarvis DeBerry

This article originally appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

"Katrina itself is over, the Katrina experience is not."



Before Hurricane Katrina, the woman explains, she'd never had "any nerve problems." Never before had she needed pills to keep her calm, pills to keep her from "hollering out loud in my sleep," pills to quiet "those noises I kept hearing in my head; the screaming as people were dying."

But that was then. "I am frightened and worried all the time now. So, I numb myself to try and keep myself wrapped tight. If not, all the pieces of me would fly away."

Hers is the first account in a book called Stories of Survival (and beyond): Collective Healing after Hurricane Katrina. The woman isn't named. She doesn't need to be. She's one of us. She's in her sixties. She self-identifies as having been one of this city's "working poor." In her most despairing moments, she wonders if the people who died during the storm weren't the lucky ones. "They don't have to be dealing with all this."

"What New Orleanians are going through now cannot be neatly diagnosed as post traumatic stress disorder."
click post title for the rest