Just Like Bodies, Psyches Can Drown in Disasters
By M. LAURIE LEITCH

Pairao, a 38-year-old Thai woman with vacant eyes, sits on the dusty floor of her temporary house in a refugee camp for tsunami survivors. Her face is dotted with cuts from debris that struck her as she clung to four family members, all of whom died in the waves. She has been having recurrent nightmares and flashbacks.

I sit with her as she tells how her son had gone to market that fateful day and, therefore, survived. I am there to work with the traumatic stress symptoms of survivors like Pairao. However, my first connection to her is as a mother, and I feel a surge of gratitude that my own children are alive and safe back home.

In the first days of disaster relief work, I wondered how I could possibly make a difference when the magnitude of loss, destruction and trauma was so huge. There is skepticism and hot debate among some experts as to the suitability of Western-based approaches to disaster mental health. I share this skepticism, and I arrived with my own questions about whether there is a place for mental health services in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster.

My experience with survivors like Pairao convinced me that we need a new science of disaster relief - one that gives immediate aid not just to the body or to the mind but to the two together, as inseparable parts of the whole survivor.