2.27.2007
War at home
I recently attended a panel on the mental health consequences of war. One presenter talked about Tibetan refugees living in India. Another talked about preparing and caring for the mental health needs of American soldiers going to Iraq. But the most affecting, and the most horrifying came from what one professor here calls "a small developing country called Downtown Atlanta".
The setting for the study was the public hospital, an emergency room that is the de facto primary care provider for too many people in Atlanta. The study was meant to look at the distribution of traumatic experience and trauma symptoms in a general low income population, so they randomly sampled patients from the waiting room, and asked questions about sources of trauma and response. What they found was horrifying. 50% of the women had been abused sexually or as a child. 30% of all the people surveyed had lost a friend or relative to violence within the past year. The majority felt unsafe in their neighborhoods. The figure that stayed with me, though, was 10%. That is the proportion of people who had witnessed the murder of a friend or relative just within the previous year.
Of course, with these experiences this general population had high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and other stress symptoms. It was a punch in the stomach for me. A reminder that a few miles from where I fret about homework and go to sleep safely, other people lie awake, thinking about the horrors they have already witnessed, and those to come.
The setting for the study was the public hospital, an emergency room that is the de facto primary care provider for too many people in Atlanta. The study was meant to look at the distribution of traumatic experience and trauma symptoms in a general low income population, so they randomly sampled patients from the waiting room, and asked questions about sources of trauma and response. What they found was horrifying. 50% of the women had been abused sexually or as a child. 30% of all the people surveyed had lost a friend or relative to violence within the past year. The majority felt unsafe in their neighborhoods. The figure that stayed with me, though, was 10%. That is the proportion of people who had witnessed the murder of a friend or relative just within the previous year.
Of course, with these experiences this general population had high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and other stress symptoms. It was a punch in the stomach for me. A reminder that a few miles from where I fret about homework and go to sleep safely, other people lie awake, thinking about the horrors they have already witnessed, and those to come.
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