Note from ITRC Coordinator Bob Doppelt: This story illustrates exactly why we organized the ITRC. Post trauma treatment is completely insufficient to address the traumas that lie ahead as temperatures rise. Prevention, by building widespread capacity for Transformational Resilience for all types of climate impacts--is the ONLY viable solution.
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In 2017, thousands of homes in Santa Rosa, California, were wiped off the map. Now the community is helping residents cope with the trauma
by Dean Kuipers in Santa Rosa
The American Psychological Association reports that survivors of these disasters are experiencing dramatic increases in depression, PTSD, anxiety disorders and violent behavior.
The nightmares kept coming and David Leal knew he was in trouble. A navy veteran with a can-do attitude and a solidly middle-class IT job at a hospital in Santa Rosa, California, he didn’t think of himself as mentally vulnerable. But when the Tubbs fire snatched his house off the face of the earth in the early morning hours of 9 October 2017, it hit him hard.
“Long story short, I went through a lot of PTSD,” Leal says, as we tour his nearly rebuilt home in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood. Wildfires are not uncommon in the mountains outside of this northern California town, but residents can’t remember one like this: the fire jumped six lanes of Highway 101, into the city, and licked up about 1,300 of the suburb’s 2,000 homes as if they’d just evaporated. Leal thought, I live in the city; it’s not supposed to burn.
“Retiring from the navy, I had a lot of junk in my head,” he adds. After the fire, it all came up. “I was having nightmares of occurrences that I went through in the military – but it was going even further back. My brain was just unloading. Every traumatic issue I ever had in my life was coming back to me. There were things that I went through as a little boy that I was waking up going, ‘Whoa. Where did that come from?’”
The climate crisis is manifesting as ever-bigger wildfires, hurricanes, floods and heat waves; and cities are just starting to grapple with the mental impact of the emergency. A climate task force of the American Psychological Association, citing scores of studies over the last decades, reports that survivors of these human-enhanced disasters are experiencing dramatic increases in depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorders, suicide and suicidal thoughts, violent behavior and increased use of drugs and alcohol. A Rand study found that one-third of the adult survivors of California wildfires in 2003 suffered depression and one-quarter suffered PTSD.
To continue reading, go to: https://www.theguardian.com/wo...wildfires-santa-rosa
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