There are some ghosts in today’s stories about recovery by the victims of Katrina. The GetReligion Blog defines "ghosts."
One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.
A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith
Here are two news stories about an ongoing study of the mental health and recovery of victims of Katrina. See if you can spot the ghosts in this story by AP writer Jeff Donn:
In a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a new survey reveals that the traumatized survivors of Hurricane Katrina forged a surprisingly powerful inner strength that steeled them against suicidal despair.
The study is the most elaborate post-storm survey yet. It shows that while the survivors suffered twice as much mental illness as the pre-storm population, they contemplated suicide far less often than mentally ill people surveyed before Katrina.
…
This capacity to grow from catastrophe may be an ancient survival mechanism that evolved to help humans live through frequent disasters, researchers suspect. It is sometimes called post-traumatic growth: External disasters may shake us, but also make us unwilling to give up — as in the resolve people feel in wartime.
This study takes the first major stride in quantifying such an effect. Its results were reported Monday in the online Bulletin of the World Health Organization and in a separate paper to the National Institute of Mental Health, which funded the study.
In its key findings:_It detected a 30 percent rate of suspected mental illness — double the usual — after the storm. People were predictably troubled by what they lived through and lost in the disaster.
_Yet only 1 percent of these troubled survivors either thought about or planned for suicide. Before Katrina, 8 percent of mentally ill people from the same region had such thoughts and 4 percent made plans to carry out suicide.
This striking decrease in suicidal risk appears to flow from a newfound self-confidence in the vast majority of Katrina survivors, the researchers found. More than 95 percent of all survivors professed more faith in their ability to rebuild their lives when necessary, and 70 percent felt more inner strength. These beliefs seemed to fend off suicide, because only the mentally ill people holding them showed the lower suicide risk.
The study is the most elaborate post-storm survey yet. It shows that while the survivors suffered twice as much mental illness as the pre-storm population, they contemplated suicide far less often than mentally ill people surveyed before Katrina.
Is it hard to spot this ghost? Try this line from Donn:
"The people who have these terrible experiences — they're often the ones who have these epiphanies," said Ronald Kessler, a Harvard University researcher who led the survey.
Most people who report an epihpany are eager to tell the story of what they experienced. Apparantly no one asked.
WaPo David Browncovers much of the same ground but adds
Eighty-two percent of the sample, and 69 percent of those with serious mental illness, reported they "became closer to loved ones" after the hurricane; 75 percent and 82 percent said they "found deeper meaning in life"; and 67 percent and 73 percent said they had become "more spiritual or religious."
Donn and Brown wrote their stories without inquiring into the role that becoming more spiritual or religious might have played in their “post traumatic personal growth.” The omission is understandable: they based their stories on the report of Harvard’s Hurricane Katrina Community Advisory Group. Click on the link, and search this report for “faith” “church” “religion”, “prayer” and other similar terms. The Harvard group did not inquire into the role of religion and faith in recovery from trauma. It is almost as if they wanted to call it “Post-traumatic growth syndrome" as if it were abnormal.
Maybe some journalist will spot the ghost, and do a story on how faith helps a population recover from disaster.
Comments