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FinalCall.com News
National News
The psychological impact of Katrina continues
By Jesse Muhammad
Staff Writer
Updated Jun 30, 2007 - 8:22:00 PM
New Orleans seen as the future poster child of post-traumatic stress
NEW ORLEANS (FinalCall.com) - “Years from now when they talk about post-traumatic stress, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina will be the poster child,” stated New Orleans Coroner Frank Minyard. Almost two years since the greatest natural disaster to have ever struck America, members of the New Orleans medical community believe that the storm is still killing as survivors of Hurricane Katrina continue to die from the effects of dust, mold covered homes, overwhelming financial problems, psychological and physical stress.
Despite these claims, a new state report conducted by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals said that its research “found no apparent large increases in deaths in the Greater New Orleans area” post-Katrina. “The only slight increase was in Orleans Parish for the first three months of 2006,” said Dr. Raoult Ratard, the state epidemiologist and the report’s author.
Dr. Kevin Stephens Sr., director of the New Orleans Health Department, said that the jump from 11.3 per 1,000 deaths to 14.3 per 1,000 was anything but slight.
“Slight, that’s more than a 25 percent increase in the mortality rate in Orleans Parish,” Dr. Stephens continued. “That’s a tremendous increase; a huge increase. And that’s almost twice the national average.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports the national average is 8.1 deaths per 1,000. The mortality rates were calculated based on parish census bureau population estimates by the CDC and the U.S. Census Bureau and the number of deaths among parish residents per month. That includes a population of 223,388 in Orleans Parish.
A big gap in the state statistics was the lack of information about residents who die out of state. The Department of Health and Hospitals does not keep that data—an omission Dr. Ratard said certainly warrants analysis. Dr. Stephens has done his own analysis based on the number of obituaries since Katrina that indicate there is a 47 percent jump in mortality in the area, which will appear in the June edition of the Journal of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, the American Medical Association’s new publication on disaster management.
Dr. Ronald Kessler, professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and head of a group that has monitored 3,000 exiled Katrina survivors, said reconstructing an individual’s mental and physical state before death might help in determining exact causes of death.
“There are high rates of mental health problems among the survivors and previous research has found that mental disorders are predictors of earlier death rates,” Dr. Kessler said. “So putting the two together in New Orleans is not surprising.”
“We’re seeing triple the number of people with mental health problems as we were before Katrina,” said Leah Hedrick, social worker at Ochsner Hospital. “Depression, suicidal, anxiety, abuse of drugs and alcohol—along with that comes a lot more physical problems.” The suicide rate in the first four months after Katrina rose almost 300 percent over pre-storm levels, according to coroner’s office statistics.
A survey last spring, cited in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found only 22 of 196 practicing psychiatrists had returned to the city since the storm. Dr. Stephens’ health department hasn’t been immune either—staffing has dropped from 300 to about 60, he says. One of his nurses who tended evacuees in the Superdome during the storm is among the city’s suicides. On June 11, a member of the New Orleans Police department who was involved in the attack of an elderly school teacher in the in French Quarter committed suicide.
“If a person has not been to the city of New Orleans since Katrina and spent time touring the ravaged neighborhoods and actually talking to people who have lost material possessions, family members and who have family displaced throughout the country, they cannot really understand the magnitude of the emotional and psychological impact of this disaster.,” stated Minister Willie Muhammad of Muhammad’s Mosque No. 46 in New Orleans. “You have activists, clergymen and others who are fighting to help people rebuild their homes, get insurance money, get family members back home, while they themselves are faced with the very same challenges and even more. So it is very important for us to guard against allowing our level of sensitivity and compassion to extend only as far as the attention that is given by the media.”
Min. Muhammad also mentioned that efforts are currently being made to host a National Millions More Movement conference in the city of New Orleans, which is in line with the instructions of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan to make New Orleans the centerpiece of the Movement.
(Visit www.noineworleans.org to find out how you can help Muhammad Mosque #46 in its rebuilding efforts. For more information on the Millions More Movement email at [email protected].)
