The first in a series of Public Service Announcements I shot for Katrina survivors
My heart hurts for my hometown, for the Gulf. I can't sleep at night, my chest is tight. These amazing people, the huge hugs they give, the smiles they flash, the parties they throw. If you've ever experienced their spirit you never forget it. That's what makes this so hard for me.
"Summing up what has happened since the hurricanes destroyed large parts of four Gulf Coast states last August, doctors from the departments of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, Duke University Medical Center and Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center paint a fairly grim picture of the instability that has followed:
• One survey found that 68 percent of female caregivers had a mental health disability because of symptoms of depression, anxiety or other psychiatric disorders.
• Another survey found that 19 percent of police officers and 22 percent of firefighters reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while 26 percent of police and 27 percent of firefighters reported major depressive symptoms.
• A crisis-call center in Mississippi handling inquiries mostly from people dealing with depression and anxiety reported a 61 percent increase in volume between March 1 and May 31, 2006, compared with the period just after the hurricanes, Oct 31 and Dec. 31, 2005.
• The deputy coroner of New Orleans recorded almost a threefold increase in suicide rates, from nine per 100,000 to 26 per 100,000 in the four months after Katrina hit. And the murder rate in New Orleans, which fell in 2005, has risen by 37.1 percent above pre-hurricane levels for the first half of 2006.
• In Louisiana, mental health counselors supported by federal government agencies made 158,260 referrals. This doesn't include people who sought support independently.
• Recent estimates suggest that only 140 of 617 primary-care physicians have returned to practice in New Orleans. Only 100 doctors along the Gulf Coast area are participating in the Medicaid program, compared to 400 before Katrina hit.
• And estimates also suggest that only 22 of 196 psychiatrists continue to practice in New Orleans, while the number of psychiatric hospital beds has been sharply reduced: as of June 14, the authors said, there were only two psychiatric beds within a 25-mile radius of New Orleans.
3 comments:
Love the picture!
Given that mental health services are already in short supply, thanks to many years of ignorant stigma, I can only imagine what kind of shortage NOLA is dealing with. It's hard to have much hope for the region, knowing we have two years of Bush administration incompetence left to weather.
We have a friend who is a police captain in NO... his wife told us that his Post Tramatic Stress after staying through the storm and it's aftermath is worse than anything he's ever dealt with. This man is a tough ass reservist who's seen tours in Iraq. It's the ineptitude and abandonment of his hometown that eats him up.
Glad to see you back. The story isn't gone, it's just deeper. Your pictures are worth a thousand words, and your eloquent writing helps to succinctly depict the difficulty of everyday life in gulf region.
I am a clinical social worker. I came down there twice to do mental health relief work, for all the good it did. The need is overwhelming and local resources are having a hard time with the numbers of people needing help. I wish I could do more.
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