School counselors are seeing further concerns underneath Harvey trauma
When Tropical Storm Harvey flooded Houston, it was easy to see the effects. First, all the homes damaged or destroyed, and later on financial spreadsheets when the billions in losses that were tallied. However, many Houstonians are dealing with a less obvious effect from the storm on their lives — psychological trauma.
“I think it was so immediately relevant to those administrators because they themselves were experiencing the trauma,” said Lisa Descant of support organization Communities in Schools. “It was just so apparent to them that the students were going to be returning with some real mental health challenges.”
“They were for the first time witnessing that their family didn’t have choice,” said David Head, Director of Mental Health and Wellness for CIS, “and I think it was interesting for me to note that there were that effect in neighborhoods that hadn’t happened before, because in a lot of our underprivileged neighborhoods that happens all the time.”
“A lot of the traumas that students were going through were already preexisting and that the storm in and of itself wasn’t the traumatic experience but it was the thing that broke the camel’s back,” Head said. “It was the extra thing that revealed that all of these other unaddressed mental health issues were there. So we went from looking a large mental health problem to an even larger one revealed after the storm went through.”
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