Therapy After Terror

by tristero

One aspect of the 9/11 attacks that has gone quite unremarked for the most part is that it was a city-wide, if not country and world-wide mental health emergency. Karen Seeley, a psychotherapist and professor, has written a terrific book about the experience of therapists on 9/11 and the aftermath called Therapy After Terror: 9/11, Psychotherapists, and Mental Health. This is from a NY Times article about her research and the experience of other therapists (full disclosure: Karen Seeley and her family are good friends of ours):

[M]ost therapists, trained in the main to help people one at a time, were not ready for this “collective catastrophe,” Dr. Seeley said. “For everybody, it was unprecedented. Firefighters weren’t prepared. Police weren’t prepared. Neither were therapists.”

Dr. Seeley spent the better part of two years conducting in-depth interviews with 35 therapists who had worked closely with 9/11 survivors and families…

What she learned was that the pros in her field not only were ill prepared for the disaster but also became overwhelmed by the horrific stories that they heard and by their own terrorism-induced anxieties. Obviously, victims’ families suffered most. But all New Yorkers were traumatized to some degree. Their city had been attacked. As the country entered a constant state of war, they were told by political leaders to be afraid. Many were.

Being human, therapists often succumbed to the same fears. Dr. Seeley called it “simultaneous trauma” — “an extremely rare clinical situation in which therapists were deeply shaken by the same catastrophic events that injured the patients they were treating.”