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Tribune News Service
Tribune News Service
National
Christine Vestal

'Katrina brain': The invisible long-term toll of devastating storms

NEW ORLEANS _ Brandi Wagner thought she had survived Hurricane Katrina. She hung tough while the storm's 170-mph winds pummeled her home, and powered through two months of sleeping in a sweltering camper outside the city with her boyfriend's mother. It was later, after the storm waters had receded and Wagner went back to New Orleans to rebuild her home and her life that she fell apart.

"I didn't think it was the storm at first. I didn't really know what was happening to me," Wagner, now 48, recalls. "We could see the waterline on houses, and rooftop signs with 'please help us,' and that big X where dead bodies were found. I started sobbing and couldn't stop. I was crying all the time, just really losing it."

Twelve years later, Wagner is disabled and unable to work because of the depression and anxiety she developed in the wake of the 2005 storm. She's also in treatment for an opioid addiction that developed after she started popping prescription painkillers and drinking heavily to blunt the day-to-day reality of recovering from Katrina.

More than 1,800 people died in Katrina from drowning and other immediate injuries. But public health officials say that, in the aftermath of an extreme weather event like a hurricane, the toll of long-term psychological injuries builds in the months and years that follow, outpacing more immediate injuries and swamping the health care system long after emergency workers go home and shelters shut down.

That's the rough reality that will soon confront regions affected by this year's string of destructive hurricanes. As flood waters recede from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate, and survivors work to rebuild communities in Texas, Florida and the Caribbean, mental health experts warn that the hidden psychological toll will mount over time, expressed in heightened rates of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, domestic violence, divorce, murder and suicide.

Renee Funk, who manages hurricane response teams for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says it has become clear since Katrina that mental illness and substance abuse aren't just secondary problems _ they are the primary long-term effect of natural disasters.

"People have trouble coping with the new normal after a storm," Funk said. "Many have lost everything, including their jobs. Some may have lost loved ones, and now they have to rebuild their lives. They're faced with a lot of barriers, including mental illness itself," she said.

In New Orleans, doctors are still treating the psychological devastation of Katrina. More than 7,000 patients receive care for mental and behavioral health conditions just from the Jefferson Parish Human Services Authority, a state-run mental health clinic in Marrero, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. At least 90 percent of the patients lived through Katrina and many still suffer from storm-related disorders, according to medical director and chief psychiatrist Thomas Hauth, who adds that he and most of his fellow clinicians also suffer from some level of long-term anxiety from the storm.

"Every year about this time, I start checking the National Weather Service at least three times a day," he said.

These long-term mental health effects of extreme weather are a hidden public health epidemic, one that is expected to strain the U.S. health care system as the intensity and frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, earthquakes and other natural disasters increase in coming decades because of global warming and other planetary shifts.

With climatologists promising more extreme weather across the country, mental and behavioral health systems need to start preparing and expanding dramatically or demand for treatment of the long-term psychological effects of future natural disasters will vastly outstrip the supply of practitioners, said Georges Benjamin, director of the American Public Health Association.

"On a blue sky day, our mental health resources are stretched," said Carol North, researcher and professor of psychiatry at University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. "There's a lot we don't know yet, but common sense tells us that more disasters and worse disasters will lead to worse psychological effects."

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