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'I'm losing my mind'
23/09/2005 14:09 - (SA)
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| Hurricane survivor J R says, "Those people who were abandoned in New Orleans, they were abandoned long before that hurricane hit. We all were." (Ben Margot, AP) |
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Mississippi - Tom Leynes once was a carpenter, a popular man with an apartment just a block off the beach, "a happy guy."
Today Leynes lives in a fly-covered pup tent. He's bearded and haggard, each day wearing the same camouflage green shorts and distant stare. He's trying to fend off a deepening depression with cans of beer and Valium, and on some days the 49-year-old man is barely coherent.
But the sedatives and the passage of time are not helping. It's getting harder to sleep, harder to smile, harder not to cry at the memory of discovering the hand-in-hand corpses of two little girls.
"I'm losing my mind," he says.
It's been nearly a month since Hurricane Katrina wrecked the lives of thousands of people. But many of the storm's survivors are finding it harder to cope today than immediately after the storm.
Life will not be the same
"People are recognising this isn't like a tornado where things will be rebuilt and life will get back. Life will not be the same. So there is a despair and a depression that is setting in," said Dr Dorothy Dickson-Rishel, a psychologist at Memorial Hospital at Gulfport.
Dickson-Rishel said that in the past week, she and her colleagues have heard increasing reports of sleeplessness, anxiety and even domestic violence. "And these are not folks who have had trouble with violence or rage before," she says.
And then there are the tears. Many people, even those who seem in high spirits, begin to cry when asked about their daily routine, or their home, or relatives who were forced to shelter miles away.
Experts say it's the same phenomenon that's played out after terrorist attacks, house fires, car accidents and other traumatic events.
"As things subside a little and the immediate threat disappears, some of the processing of what actually happened occurs," said Dr Israel Liberzon, a University of Michigan psychiatrist who specialises in post-traumatic stress disorder.
Gone is the adrenaline rush that came with surviving the hurricane, and much of the esprit de corps that helped people deal with the primitive conditions immediately afterward. The adventure is over, but life has not returned to normal.
"You don't know where your friends are. The kids aren't in school. Even the way a lot of people drive to work is different," said Julie Bosley, a Waveland resident who commutes to work at Gulfport's Garden Park Medical Centre.
"There are just so many changes."
Add to that the looming presence of Hurricane Rita.
Tom Leynes survived but said he saw death all around him. One day he discovered two dead little girls, holding hands, and it devastated him.
"I just never will forget the look on their faces. If I'd had my gun, I'd have laid right across the top of them and went boom," he said.
He got a Valium prescription from a doctor after the storm, which he said is the first medication he's ever taken for an emotional imbalance. Before the storm? "Just Busch (beer)," he said.
- AP
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