From tomorrow's
front-page NYT:
New Orleans is experiencing what appears to be a near epidemic of depression and post-traumatic stress disorders, one that mental health experts say is of an intensity rarely seen in this country. It is contributing to a suicide rate that state and local officials describe as close to triple what it was before Hurricane Katrina struck and the levees broke 10 months ago.
Compounding the challenge, the local mental health system has suffered a near total collapse, heaping a great deal of the work to be done with emotionally disturbed residents onto the Police Department and people like Sergeant Glaudi, who has sharp crisis management skills but no medical background. He says his unit handles 150 to 180 such distress calls a month.
The majority of the nation might have moved on since Katrina hit the Gulf, but the residents are still struggling to put the pieces back together.
This is a city where thousands of people are living amid ruins that stretch for miles on end, where the vibrancy of life can be found only along the slivers of land next to the Mississippi. Garbage is piled up, the crime rate has soared, and as of Tuesday the National Guard and the state police were back in the city, patrolling streets that the Police Department has admitted it cannot handle on its own. The reminders of death are everywhere, and the emotional toll is now becoming clear.
Gina Barbe rode out the storm at her mother's house near Lake Pontchartrain, and says she has been crying almost every day since.
"I thought I could weather the storm, and I did -- it's the aftermath that's killing me," said Ms. Barbe, who worked in tourism sales before the disaster. "When I'm driving through the city, I have to pull to the side of the street and sob. I can't drive around this city without crying."
Many people who are not at serious risk of suicide are nonetheless seeing their lives eroded by low-grade but persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness and stress-related illnesses, doctors and researchers say.
We've seen images of piles of rubble clearly enough on our television screens. What's less readily apparent, and more devastating, is the inner reckage that has resulted from Katrina. The two are inextricably connected...with the remaining outer damage a constant reminder of Katrina's continuing emotional toll. Turning the page is impossible while the means for reconstruction has been slowed to a snail's pace. The unresponsive bureaucracy has left the citizens with a feeling of powerlessness equal to that caused by the hurricane.
No wonder the crime rate has gone up.
"When you don't have a place to send that wandering schizophrenic directing traffic, guess what? Law enforcement is going to wind up taking care of that," said Dr. Rouse, the deputy coroner. "When the Police Department is forced to do the job of the mental health system, it's a lose-lose situation for everyone."
"When the family comes to see me at the coroner's office," he added, "it's a defeat. The state has a moral obligation to reinstitute this care."
"When you can't get ahold of people you used to know, it leaves you feeling kind of empty," Ms. Lindsley said. "When you try to explain it to people in other cities, they say: 'The whole world is over it, so you've got to get over it. Sorry that happened, but too bad. Move on.'"
Some people have decided to leave solely because of the mood of the city.
"I'm really aware of the air of mild depression that pervades this entire area," said Gayle Falgoust, a retired teacher. "I'm leaving after this month. I worry about living with this level of depression all the time. I worry that it might affect my health. I know the move will improve my mood."
Which begs the question of what will become of New Orleans? Is it to die a silent death of exhaustion and inaction? Almost ten months after Katrina hit, very little in the way of reconstruction has taken place. Some of the plans that have been discussed on a federal level (particularly by the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development), amount to outright gentrification, casting out the very people hit hardest by the disaster. (More on this here.) Another, by the Louisiana state legislature, amounts to an opportune push of charter schools while shutting down the vast majority of the public schools in the area.
Bill Quigley, law professor at New Orleans' Loyola University, succintly sums it up:
[T]here is a lesson here. It's a teaching lesson for us about the priorities of our country, the priorities of the people in power, and the way that they are willing to marginalize and just discard the needs of poor and working folks in this community, but in communities all across this country.
In the meantime, mere survival becomes more and more trying in an area struggling to regain its sense of place and normality.