Free Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story by Mac McClelland Page B

pressure was too weak to run a shower. Phone service hadn’t been restored. We lived on the second floor of a house in a neighborhood that had largely been, along with 80 percent of the rest of the city, submerged, and mostly abandoned. Tree lawns and neutral grounds—that’s New Orleanian for a grassy median—were piled with moldy refrigerators and drowned cars, and the National Urban Search and Rescue’s spray paint was all over the houses, codes for the date and time and unit of the search-and-rescue plus the hazards ( RATS ) and number of bodies found, written in quadrants formed by a giant X. Plus the tags advertising the findings of the Louisiana SPCA, such as TWO DEAD CATS . There were greasy black stripes drawn across almost every building, waterlines from the flood. There was no mail. My best friend and neighbor, who I’d tried to calm from paroxysm on the sidewalk, gasping and shrieking after shoving in her flood-warped door and finding her belongings ruined with black mold, was drunk all the time, and so were some of my professors. Some people felt renewed and reinvigorated by the challenge of rebuilding after the storm, but most everyone I knew was bloated from booze and weeping and junk food, anxiety and uncertainty even under brave faces and good times.
    Natural disasters, unsurprisingly, are a reliable source of PTSD. New Orleans then was like a case study of it. There’s the horror of a disaster itself, but also the sense of continuing, imminent danger. Some of my interviewees in Haiti whose houses hadn’t fallen had slept in their yards for months after the quake for fear that an aftershock would bring it down on them after all. In New Orleans, with tens of thousands of homes destroyed and nearly 2,000 dead, we were reminded, with every step down the street, that the Earth we walked on could not be trusted. (Being reminded of it again with news and footage of Haiti’s earthquake proved unbearable to many residents; the nonprofit that would soon offer therapy to the fishermen’s wives during the oil spill registered a huge upswing of calls after the Caribbean quake.)
    As it turns out, New Orleans then was a case study of PTSD. Harvard and Columbia University researchers descended dutifully upon the city, finding that about a quarter of the population was exhibiting symptoms—a rate that for, say, measles would qualify as a full-scale public health crisis.
    On the ground, we heard nothing about it. I even participated in a study, conducted by I don’t know whom, in which I answered a survey about whether I was drinking more, crying more, exercising less and eating worse food, getting fatter because I was depressed or displaced, and/or losing my will to live. (I wasn’t.) The researcher had recruited us through someone at the university, but didn’t bother sending us the results. We heard nothing of the assessments people were making of us, unless we went academic-journal searching for them, much less how to get help for a serious but treatable condition. There were public health notices not to drink the water on certain days, but I never heard any suggesting that we should be on the lookout for symptoms of trauma.
    And so, no one was. And almost no one did get treatment. Nearly two years later, in 2007, when the East Coast researchers checked back in on New Orleans’s psychological progress, they found that there was hardly any. Further, they found that, though PTSD rates almost always decrease within two years of such an event, Gulf Coast residents overall had got worse, regardless of race or sex. More than 6 percent of the population’s members were actively thinking about killing themselves. Two and a half percent had a suicide plan. Statistics in 2008, in 2009—three years after the storm, four years after the storm—would later bear out suicide rates 56 percent higher, then 85 percent higher, than those before Hurricane Katrina.
    “Everyone’s saying this knocked us on our knees?” one