While oil gushes at a heart-break pace, destroying the environment and killing tourism across the shores of five Gulf Coast states, as well as Mexico, experts are beginning to put a tape measure on the long-term effects, and repercussions of one aspect that is "dangerously overlooked," according to LiveScience.com, that would be human mental health.
Psychologically speaking, one expert who is a noted author, Raymond Goldsteen, public health researcher at Stony Brook University in New York who penned "Demanding Democracy After Three Mile Island" (University Press of Florida, 1991), equated the oil spill to among the worst disasters in U.S. history.
As reported on LiveScience.com, not all disasters are created equally when it comes to mental health.
"Severity really drives the [psychological] consequences," said Fran Norris, director and researcher at the National Center for Disaster Mental Health Research at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire. But all other factors being equal, the type of disaster can exacerbate certain feelings and reactions in the affected population, Norris said.
Psychologists historically lump disasters into two categories:
Natural (hurricanes, earthquakes)
Man-made (bombings, nuclear plant explosions)
The oil spill, while increasingly becoming a battle with the Earth, was undoubtedly caused by us humans. And man-made disasters are particularly hard for people to cope with, Goldsteen told LiveScience.
"This being the worst man-made disaster to hit the States," Goldsteen said, "we should not take lightly the mental health aspects of it. We can't expect people to just get over it. They need immediate help in the form of counseling — either peer counseling or professional counseling."
Natural disasters are viewed as normal events -- they are suppose to happen -- for a functioning planet (for instance, forest fires clearing trees as a process of renewal), and thus are usually easier to rebound from psychologically, Goldsteen said.
But man-made disasters are viewed as outside the normal order of life and are thus more threatening to an individual's worldview, Goldsteen explained.
In man-made disasters, It takes much longer for people to psychologically recover, he said. People worry more about health consequences, for themselves and their children, and have greater feelings of uncertainty after a man-made disaster because there is no history to reflect on in order for us to chart a better understanding.
"People looking at the oil in the marshes and all the damage ... are thinking, 'This is not what is supposed to happen,'" Goldsteen told LiveScience.com.
Relatively recently, disaster psychologists have started dividing man-made disasters into two categories:
Intentional (bombings, terrorist attacks)
Technological (nuclear plant explosions, bridge collapses, oil spills)
While victims of intentional attacks often suffer severe psychological consequences, technological disasters can tear at the social fabric in more insidious ways.
Technological disasters highlight the long chain of strangers we all rely on for the health and safety of ourselves and loved ones, explained Goldsteen. This ranges from engineers, shift workers and safety inspectors to CEOs and policy makers.
A disaster such as the Gulf oil spill makes people wonder if their trust has been misplaced — a psychological shake-up that has far-reaching consequences, researchers say.
"Trust is part of a person's ability to frame the world for themselves," Goldsteen said. "[It determines] how we are going to deal with our everyday life."
Trust in institutions and the government becomes a critical player in the psychological aftermath of a disaster, he said. If people trust what they are being told, feel that authorities are taking adequate responsibility and believe an event is truly accidental, stress levels are abated somewhat.
"But, in the BP oil spill, if the valve that blew is attributed to poor management or people taking short cuts, that is worse for people's psychic outlooks," Goldsteen said.
When trust frays in the fabric of our interwoven communities, people become demoralized and hopelessness prevails, he said. This can lead to an increase in the risk of suicide; drug and alcohol abuse become more prevalent; some people withdraw from society, some lose their appetites and/or feel mentally numb, others become angry, increasing rates of intrapersonal violence.
Activism is a positive. "Although we wish they wouldn't happen, some people will make good use of these events," Norris told LiveScience. "People can use events like this to call attention to problems and galvanize for change."
The toll of the nation's worst oil spill is yet to be tallied. But if trust is an issue, President Obama has issues. He's been in California as many times working the crowds to get Sen. Barbara Boxer re-elected as he has been tending to the Gulf Coast, where countless industries and species are at stake.
President Bush looked, well, presidential, with a bullhorn in his hand amid the rubble where the World Trade Towers once stood. But he looked lost when he was hugging Mike Brown, glad-handing the progress in New Orleans, just after Hurricane Katrina.
President Obama is facing his political hurricane as we speak. The world is not awash of memories of him on the scene, concerned and leading. Instead, he contiues to campaign instead of preside.
Trust. Who do we trust as this oil-spill disaster nears its 50th day of dominating the headlines?
trouble since the perception is he's jetting around campaigning for his agenda instead of presiding over a disaster where the perception is a mega-giant foreign oil company is in control of the future of the Gulf of Mexico.
know what he was doing.
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