Resilience Lets Katrina Survivors Cope

Study: Mental Illness Doubled, But Resilience May Be Curbing Suicidal Thinking

(WebMD)  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 percent before Katrina to about 31 percent after the storm.

Serious mental illness, such as major depression, panic disorder, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder, rose from 6 percent to 11 percent. 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.