Dealing with Crisis 1 of 4 (Dr. Brent Lindquist)

Hello again.  After last month’s kind of melancholy topic of homesickness I thought I’d try and work on a more positive topic, however, the events of the world have intruded.  And many of you are very much aware of the December tsunami that crashed ashore following the earthquake in Indonesia.  In every news media every day there are thousands of lines and videos and all of that just talking about the impact and the world is responding.  The world is rushing to the help of those people.

I was asked if I would give you folks out there in listener land some background of crisis and crisis management and different things that might help you.  Some of you are in crises, or crisis, as part of your normal life so maybe some of this will be helpful as well.  What is a disaster or crisis?  I’m going to be using material, I will be annotating material that I got off a website from the State of New York Office of Mental Health.  I’m using that because it’s fairly generic and fairly brief.  I don’t want to go into a lot of things, but I do want to give you kind of an overview.

So what is a disaster?  A disaster is a man-made or natural event of severity and magnitude that normally results in death, injury and property damage that cannot be managed through the routine procedures and resources of government.  Now that’s what the State of New York says.  Most of the time a crisis and a disaster exceed the ability of the governing bodies to manage it, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing, there are many…  I think we’ve heard so many times about people saying, It’s just grows out of the sea.  The way it came we had no warning.  There was a tremendous change in your surroundings.  Just look at those pictures.  Indeed, don’t look at those pictures very much. One of the problems of people who weren’t in the disaster have is that they get too focused.  In the United States, with CNN round-the-clock news and ready access to the internet, people are watching over and over again the videos of the tsunamis hitting the shore in the various countries.  Friends of mine report that they’ve had trouble sleeping.  They’re dealing with some situational anxiety and even a foreboding sense of hopelessness about all of this, mostly as a result of watching videos and listening to radio and TV and reading about it.  So, you need to have balance.  There’s a lot of communication out there for parents to not let their kids watch too much television of the tsunami.  That’s good advice for adults too.

There are particular parts of us that make us more vulnerable to the challenges of crisis as well.  Health - people that have disabilities, or medical problems or are on medication, those people have more of a struggle.  People with a lack of social support networks, people who have been widowed or divorced, people with language barriers.  Demographic categories include age.  Younger and older people have more difficulties.  Imagine and think about the children that have lost their mother and father and many of their aunts and uncles and grandparents, etc.  Finally, the past history.  If you’d had a past history of crisis and trauma in your life, and you didn’t deal with it or you didn’t have the right kind of social support, there is the chance something like this can make you more vulnerable.  So those are some of the ways in which this stuff happens.

What are some symptoms that we have with responses to crises?  Well, physiological symptoms, or symptoms arising out of our body includes fatigue, shock, nausea, headaches, chills, muscle aches, dizziness, grinding of teeth.  Cognitive, or thinking symptoms, include:  memory loss, concentration problems, decision making difficulties, calculation difficulties.  Emotional symptoms include:  anxiety, overwhelmed feelings, grief, identification with victims, depression, anticipation of harm to self or others.  Finally, behavioural symptoms look at things like insomnia, can’t sleep, or can only sleep, the opposite as well, crying very easily, a ‘gallows’ kind of humour…some of us that are kind of cynical and sarcastic can get even more so in these kinds of crises, hyper-vigilence, that is, seeing threat in places that there may not be threat.  And an unwillingness to necessarily leave the scene.

Let me tell you about the stages, or psychological stages of a disaster. There are 4 that are in all of the literature and I first saw it in Red Cross so I want to say that probably the Red Cross has done the most for looking at that.  The Red Cross websites around the world are good places to get additional information, by the way.

The first stage is heroic and that is immediately after the impact.  This is a time of altruism, heroic behaviour, people going the extra mile.  You hear wonderful testimonies of those kinds of things happening.  The second stage is the honeymoon stage.  That usually runs from one week to 3 – 6 months after.  The time of sharing and help, social attachment is high.  Everybody is pitching in.  Of course, this depends on the severity of the crisis.

The next stage is disillusionment.  I’ve talked a lot about that and I will talk a lot more about disillusionment.  This comes along 2 months approximately to 1 – 2 years after.  Feelings of disappointment, anger, resentment and bitterness or expectations for recovery and support are not met.  This is what we’re beginning to see.  I don’t think we need to wait 2 months after this tsunami because there’s a high expectation and a high sense of being left out.  And indeed, a lot of the systems that people hoped would work have proven to be irreparably damaged and won’t be fixed for quite a while.  Disillusionment is where people get angry and upset and they give up.

Finally, the reconstruction.  This is for several years following the disaster.  A physical and emotional reinvestment takes place.  Now in the best case scenario, the reconstruction is to a new level of effectiveness.  Unfortunately, without some of the things I’m going to talking about in other programs, we don’t necessarily see the reconstruction going.  We almost see a retrenchment, that is we see people leveling out at a lower level of functioning.  Communities, countries even, sometimes don’t recover for decades.  There are some countries that do.  I think of the crisis in Rwanda a number of years ago.  Some good things are happening there.  But I’m sure you can think of many places that are still struggling mightily and not feeling very well at all both in terms of the cultural context and the emotional life of the people following the crisis that hit them.

A couple of final thoughts for this session today.  Don’t overanalyze your own responses.  Even though you may be thousands of miles away from this particular crisis in the southern Indian Ocean, you need to recognize that all of this is just part of everybody’s unique experience.  People’s experiences in the midst of the immediate process after the crisis are going to be very unique.  And give a little grace during this time, both in terms of how you experience things or the people around you.  If somebody says they’re having trouble sleeping because of this and you’re thinking to yourself, Man, they live so far away.  There’s no way a wave is going to come and get us here.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s important for you to give them grace because they are experiencing on a real level the emotionality of all of this.  So give a little grace is the first thing, then the second thing I want you to remember is – individual reactions and intensities will recover on different levels of time.  Somebody may have one night of bad dreams or problems and then someone may struggle with a week of those same things.  Symptoms that come up of irritability, of insomnia, of depression, of hopelessness, that last more than a couple of weeks generally are probably are going to be here to stay but symptoms like that that happen right after a crisis are part of the normal crisis response.

So as you think through all of this, think – let me give a little grace, let me give a little time, let me listen to each other and let me try and have hope.  Talk to you next time!