Resilience Lets Katrina Survivors Cope

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

(WebMD) 
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.

Who Shows Resiliency?

Low-income people were particularly likely to report resiliency after Hurricane Katrina.

That may be because they were most likely to have had the most traumatic experiences during and after the storm.

"People who have these kind of epiphany experiences are often the ones who had the most terrible stresses," Kessler says.

"The fact that poor people were much more exposed to these terrible, terrible kinds of experiences could well account for the fact that they were the ones that were more likely to say my life has been transformed," he adds.

"But other than that, we find [resiliency] across the board -- young and old, male and female," Kessler says.

"There's more of it in the New Orleans area because there was more terrible, terrible kind of stuff that people were exposed to, but it's pretty pervasive throughout the area," Kessler says.

Transforming Experiences

For some Gulf Coast residents, the storm changed the way they see themselves.

"We had a substantial number of people who said, 'You know, I did something that I just never thought that I would do. I went out and saved this kid. And it makes me feel like I'm a different kind of person than I was before. I jumped into the water and I pulled him out. There's a life that's there that wouldn't be there if it wasn't for me,'" Kessler says.

"There were those kind of experiences that were interspersed with all this terrible stuff that happened to people," Kessler says. "That's something that makes them feel connected in a way that very often they didn't feel before."

"Few of us, as you know, have the experience in our lives where we're confronted with a situation where we've got to jump in and save the kid or not. It's nice that we can say, 'Well, I always knew I would do that kind of stuff.' [With] these people, it actually happened. And in many cases, it's a life-transforming experience," Kessler says.

Weariness Ahead?

"There's a lot of hope for the future," Kessler says. But there's also the risk of burnout, Kessler notes.

"Whether that hope for the future is going be something that's there for the long term, if recovery efforts don't keep pace with the relatively high expectations that people seem to have. That's obviously a nagging concern that we have in looking at these kinds of data," Kessler says.

He and his colleagues will follow about 1,000 Katrina survivors for two years after the storm to see how they fare.

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SOURCES: Kessler, R. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Aug. 28, 2006; online edition. Ronald Kessler, PhD, Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School. Juan Lizarraga, New Orleans resident. News release, Harvard Medical School.