Everything in Its Path by Kai T. Erikson

Author:Kai T. Erikson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

Individual Trauma: State of Shock

THE FIRST CHAPTER of this report tried to suggest what the disaster looked like to the people who experienced it. We should now try to imagine what the disaster felt like, and the only responsible way to approach that objective is to quote the survivors at some length and allow them to carry the main burden of the discussion. Some of the quotations to follow may seem unnecessarily grisly and others may seem unnecessarily repetitive, but one has to become immersed in the overwhelming mass of detail to gain even a dim notion of what happened. The words we will be reading were uttered by solo voices, each of them expressing a private grief in a private way; but they are drawn from a vast chorus of similar voices, and together they tell of experiences common to a whole community.

First, a few figures. Some 615 survivors of the Buffalo Creek flood were examined by psychiatrists a year and a half after the event in connection with the legal action described earlier, and at least 570 of them, a grim 93 percent, were found to be suffering from an identifiable emotional disorder. Now a skeptical neighbor from another of the behavioral sciences may want to make some allowance for the fact that psychiatrists looking for mental disorder are more than apt to find it, but even so, the sheer volume of pathology is horrifying. Pittston also conducted a round of psychiatric evaluations and found a similar incidence of disorder, although the physician in charge of those examinations thought that the disturbances he was noticing could not have been a result of the flood. The medical names for the conditions observed in both sets of examination are depression, anxiety, phobia, emotional lability, hypochondria, apathy, insomnia; and the broader syndrome into which these symptoms naturally fall is post-traumatic neurosis, or, in a few cases, post-traumatic psychosis. But the nearest expressions in everyday English would be something like confusion, despair, and hopelessness. Listen to these voices for the profound pain they reflect.

As for myself, every time I go to Buffalo Creek I start to cry because it is like visiting a graveyard. I left there crying after the flood on Sunday and I wake up all through the night crying. I can see the water from the dam destroying my house, clothing, furniture, cars. We lost everything we had saved all our lives in a very few minutes. I can see my friends drowning in the water and asking for help. I will never be the same person again.

I think we will have to leave Buffalo Creek before we can get any peace. I have been a resident of this place for forty-five years and now I am unhappy, dissatisfied, and disturbed. The disaster has left me very nervous. When something like that happens and all the friends you have had down the years—some are living and some are dead and some you don’t know where they’re at—you don’t forget something like that.

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