I was reading netease and came across a link to a Blue Cross China report about post-traumatic stress disorder among the survivors of the earthquake. Well, I don’t know if what they are talking about necessarily meets the clinical definition (and I don’t have a clue what that is anyway), but more about general symptoms of psychological disturbance. The survey was done in some local Chengdu district and said that over 90% of the people surveyed had some kind of symptoms, ranging from loss of sleep to waking suddenly in the night to having hallucinations of “earthquake feelings” (meaning, I guess, the sense that they are experiencing another earthquake).
However, I found another link from that page a bit more interesting—and this was about survivor guilt manifested as suicidal tendencies among survivors. Although this phenomenon has yet to crop up, at least in significant numbers, I am guessing that the psych experts are worried because they’ve seen this kind of thing happen before. According to the article, the Chinese Psychological Association is prepping itself for some long-term intervention by setting up counseling station around the area. One representative said that after Tangshan they did 20-30 years of counseling work and people were still traumatized (or faced psychological obstacles of various sorts), and expects that the amount of long-term psych work needing to be done here to be at least that much if not more.
There was another interesting factoid in there: the report claims that after the earthquake happened about 50 teams of people numbering over 1000 total went to the earthquake to assist in psychological counseling—but most of them don’t have proper training in post-disaster counseling (or whatever the official/scientific name for it is), thus exacerbating the psychological burden on the survivors.
I don’t know if there is any way to really verify this, as it would involve a lot of leg work and research, but it reminds of me of a video i saw a couple of days ago about Hua Dan, a non-profit that uses theater-type techniques as a form of therapy, primarily for little kids of primary school age. They’re trying to get the kids to laugh and be normal and trust each other and all that good stuff—and I applaud them for that, because it’s certainly more than I am doing (i.e., nothing)—but this article I just read makes me wonder just how such a situation is handled. Do you get some experts trained in the field of post-traumatic stress disorder and exclude others, at least until some later date? Or can these types of people and skills somehow work in tandem? I don’t know, but it’s an interesting question because although the untrained might be of some help, you don’t want them as the last resort — I mean there’s no substitute for professional training in this matter is there? Though I think the work that Hua Dan does during school time should not be at odds with this kind of counseling — perhaps the issue is that there is just enough experts to be spread around, and thus you have this vacuum, but in that case you can’t really go around blaming other organizations for being the only ones there.
I wish there was some psych expert out there that could sort this out for me because these questions are making my head spin.
Technorati Tags: psychological, psychology, stress, relief, PTSD, earthquake, sichuan, wenchuan, relief, teams, humanitarian, tangshan, disaster, Chinese
1 response so far ↓
1 peijin // Jun 20, 2008 at 1:48 am
i just want to clarify that i don’t mean to single out Hua Dan as people who are untrained…they are trained, quite well, in what they do, but the point of the second article’s author was that maybe not in what is needed to combat PTSD and other psychological issues affecting the survivors.
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