Health News

Resilience Lets Katrina Survivors Cope

Aug. 28, 2006 -- Emotional resilience seems to be helping some Hurricane Katrina survivors cope in the storm's wake.

That resilience comes despite a near doubling in the prevalence of serious mental illness among Gulf Coast residents.

That's the key finding from a mental health study of more than 800 residents of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi affected by Hurricane Katrina last year.

Harvard Medical School's Ronald Kessler, PhD, and colleagues conducted the study five to eight months after Katrina.

They compared their data to mental health studies done in the same region in 2001-2003.

The prevalence of any mental illness rose from nearly 16% before Katrina to about 31% after the storm.

Serious mental illness, such as major depression, panic disorder, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder, rose from 6% to 11%. Less severe cases also increased.

Despite those increases, the study shows no rise in suicidal thinking after Katrina.

Resilient Response

Resilience appears to be the reason why suicidal thinking didn't rise after Hurricane Katrina, the researchers report.

"This sense of resilience, inner strength, is really just quite extraordinary," Kessler told reporters, in a media teleconference.

"We found an extraordinarily high proportion of our sample who said that despite the understandable sadness with all they lost and the understandable anxiety about the uncertainties of the future, [they] said that they felt closer to their loved ones, they felt connected to the community in a way they didn't before, they felt much more religious, they felt that they had purpose in their life and a meaning, that they were kind of drifting around but now they knew where they were going and they were going to lick this thing," Kessler says.

Kessler's team checked that the survey participants mirrored the area's pre-Katrina population as closely as possible. The researchers weighted the data to make up for any differences in the prestorm and poststorm groups.

Data on completed suicides after Hurricane Katrina aren't available yet.

Survivor's Story

Juan Lizarraga, a lawyer in New Orleans, now living in a FEMA trailer in his front yard, joined Kessler in the teleconference.

"I think what has been hardest, of course, is just to develop a sense of patience and the recognition that things do not happen nearly as quickly as we would like them to happen," Lizarraga says.

"But you have to develop almost a day-to-day mentality and be happy when little things happen, because of the vastness of this disaster," Lizarraga continues.

"The battle for us is a continual battle against negativity," he adds.

"I believe the question was asked to me once, 'What if you rebuild and nobody else in your block rebuilds?' And our answer at the time was, 'Somebody has to start,'" he says.

"Believe me, I've been through many hurricanes before Katrina. So it's something we have learned to live with," says Lizarraga.