Survey reveals victims' strength against despair

A capacity to grow from catastrophe is quantified.
BOSTON (AP) -- In a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a new survey reveals that the traumatized survivors of Hurricane Katrina forged a surprisingly powerful inner strength that steeled them against suicidal despair.
The study is the most elaborate post-storm survey yet. It shows that while the survivors suffered twice as much mental illness as the pre-storm population, they contemplated suicide far less often than mentally ill people surveyed before Katrina.
"The people who have these terrible experiences -- they're often the ones who have these epiphanies," said Ronald Kessler, a Harvard University researcher who led the survey.
This capacity to grow from catastrophe may be an ancient survival mechanism that evolved to help humans live through frequent disasters, researchers suspect. It is sometimes called post-traumatic growth: External disasters may shake us, but also make us unwilling to give up -- as in the resolve people feel in wartime. This study takes the first major stride in quantifying such an effect. Its results were reported Monday in the online Bulletin of the World Health Organization and in a separate paper to the National Institute of Mental Health, which funded the study.
In a nutshell
In its key findings:
It detected a 30 percent rate of suspected mental illness -- double the usual -- after the storm. People were predictably troubled by what they lived through and lost in the disaster.
Yet only 1 percent of these troubled survivors either thought about or planned for suicide. Before Katrina, 8 percent of mentally ill people from the same region had such thoughts and 4 percent made plans to carry out suicide.
This striking decrease in suicidal risk appears to flow from a newfound self-confidence in the vast majority of Katrina survivors, the researchers found. More than 95 percent of all survivors professed more faith in their ability to rebuild their lives when necessary, and 70 percent felt more inner strength. These beliefs seemed to fend off suicide, because only the mentally ill people holding them showed the lower suicide risk.
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