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Natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes often leave survivors traumatized and at risk of mental health problems. But researchers studying the mental health impacts of Hurricane Katrina have also discovered something surprising over the past 20 years. A significant number of survivors say the storm also changed them for the better. NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee reports.
RHITU CHATTERJEE, BYLINE: NhuNgoc Pham (ph) was a high school student when Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29, 2005.
NHUNGOC PHAM: I was living in Jefferson Parish, which is the parish adjacent to Orleans, which is where most of the floodwater appeared.
CHATTERJEE: Pham's parents, immigrants from Vietnam, had recently bought their first home. The family had been in the new house for just a month when they got the news about the approaching hurricane.
PHAM: We just thought of it as another storm. It's going to come. It's going to pass. We're going to take a hurrication (ph), as some of us liked to call it back then.
CHATTERJEE: So, the family went to Houston, Texas, expecting to stay a few days. When they finally returned home a couple months later, they saw that the storm winds had taken a toll on the house.
PHAM: So like, the roof and things like that had to be replaced. The back patio was gone, and that needed to be replaced.
CHATTERJEE: Pham remembers how stressed her parents were at the time.
PHAM: I saw the physical sign of stress. I think they weren't sleeping a lot. There was a lot of insomnia, just a lot of, like, worrying - just, like, constantly talking about, what are we going to do next?
CHATTERJEE: Like many first-generation immigrants in her community, Pham's parents spoke little English. They didn't know how to apply for federal funds to rebuild. So the parents in the community turned to their kids for help. At least they were fluent in English and computer savvy.
PHAM: So we had to grow up really quickly. We had to become sort of an adult in some ways to help our family and just help people in our community rebuild.
CHATTERJEE: She describes the experience as formative.
PHAM: The Katrina experience made me grow as a person, also made me rethink about, how do you recover from a major trauma?
CHATTERJEE: That's a question that's shaped her professional life. Pham is now a public health researcher working on emergency preparedness for CNA, a research organization working on national security. She's also an adjunct professor at Tulane University. Her Ph.D. research looked at data on nearly 350 Katrina survivors collected by other researchers over a decade. And she found that the kind of personal growth she experienced after Katrina was common among survivors.
PHAM: There's the saying - right? - that which does not kill us, make us stronger.
CHATTERJEE: Researchers call it post-traumatic growth, and it shows up in other studies as well. Sociologist Mary Waters is at Harvard University. She and her collaborators have followed over a thousand single parents who were enrolled in community colleges in New Orleans before Katrina and followed them for about a dozen years after. They found in several studies that people experienced personal growth in several ways.
MARY WATERS: One is, I feel that I'm more open to new possibilities. Another is relating to others - I relate to others better since this trauma. Personal strength - I realize that I can survive a terrible thing.
CHATTERJEE: She says nearly two-thirds of the cohort reported post-traumatic growth even 12 years after the storm.
WATERS: What they would say is the storm was terrible. I would never choose to live through that disaster. But they said, given that I went through it, it was one of the more positive things that happened in my lifetime because it got me on a new trajectory.
CHATTERJEE: Now, this doesn't mean that the trauma of the storm, the displacement, the loss of homes and loved ones didn't leave a lasting scar on people's psyches.
WATERS: In the year after the disaster, when we found people, 44% of them reported symptoms of PTSD, intrusive thoughts, avoiding areas that would trigger the terrible memories, panic attacks, those kinds of things.
DAVID ABRAMSON: It was very traumatic for people.
CHATTERJEE: David Abramson is a professor of social and behavioral health at New York University.
ABRAMSON: If anything, we saw the largest impact happening at around the three- to four-year mark after the hurricane. So it wasn't even immediately.
CHATTERJEE: Abramson and his colleagues also found that around three years after Katrina, there was also a spike in deaths of despair among survivors. Those are deaths from suicide, overdose and liver disease. And yet, among those who lived, post-traumatic stress often existed with post-traumatic growth. Psychologist Sarah Lowe is at Yale University and has published several studies on the topic.
SARAH LOWE: Those with the highest levels of post-traumatic stress tended to report post-traumatic growth.
CHATTERJEE: But she notes that certain resources make it more or less likely that someone will grow after a major trauma like Katrina. For example, financial hardship was linked to low levels of post-traumatic growth.
LOWE: So I think financial resources really matter both pre- and post-disaster.
CHATTERJEE: Another factor - social support.
LOWE: We had a measure of perceived social support - so feelings of closeness with others, companionship, that someone's there for you if you need it.
CHATTERJEE: She says those who had more social support after the storm were more likely to say they grew from their trauma. NhuNgoc Pham at Tulane found that something called self-efficacy is also important.
PHAM: It's sort of like your personal confidence in your ability to do something.
CHATTERJEE: And it's linked to post-traumatic growth. Pham says when she thinks about how to help people recover after a big disaster, she thinks of the Japanese art form called kintsugi, which uses lacquer to mend broken pieces of pottery.
PHAM: Survivors have the potential to mend the cracks that was left behind by Hurricane Katrina and the trauma that they experience if they have the right resources.
CHATTERJEE: And people need those resources before and after a disaster. Rhitu Chatterjee, NPR News.
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