Storm Trauma |
 Dave Thurlow, Host |
More and more people are living in areas that are weather disaster prone. Hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes not only cause physical damage, but also emotional damage to the survivors. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington and this is The Weather Notebook. It's this emotional damage or 'storm trauma' that are beginning to research. Dr. Frederic Medway is a psychologist from the University of South Carolina and one of the leading storm trauma researchers.
FM: Really ever since the great floods which happened in PA now 20, 30 years ago, psychologists have been interested in the effects of natural disasters on people, whether that be floods or tornadoes and storms and hurricanes and usually, obviously the way it's studied is you really have to look for 'victims' of these natural disasters after it's been affecting them.
DT: Does this research have to be done very close to the traumatic event itself or is it a long term thing?
FM: Well, it's both. Clearly you have some of the first shock of one of these events. And you get a certain kind of reaction, kind of a numbness or a sadness, sometimes a depression, a feeling of hopelessness and powerlessness. But then subsequently what you find is that if the economic impact of one of these let's say storms is very large in area, and somebody's laid off or somebody loses their job then you have all the ultimate effects of job loss. And that may, with the economic problems lead to unfortunate ways of coping with these problems, such as increases in alcoholism and drug use.
So the story here is that mental health professionals now recognize the long lasting psycological effects of weather disasters, they're more common now, there's more impact than in past decades, and it's not fun.
Our show is underwritten by Subaru with major funding provided by the National Science Foundation.