Moscow, Bali, 9/11. The world is full of new horrors and there鈥檚 no place to hide. We all now face the kind of psychological trauma that was once wrought only by the worst natural calamities.
Who says so? Disaster psychologists, for a start. They are the folk who take in the big picture of our collective reactions to human-created disaster, the ways these reactions are caused, and our coping mechanisms. And research research into disaster psychology is growing fast: only last month the National Center on Disaster Psychology and Terrorism was set up in Palo Alto, California.
Among the big issues being addressed by these researchers are understanding the terrorists鈥� weapons, assessing the full impact of terrorism 鈥� and, crucially, working out which psychological approaches actually work. It鈥檚 a deeply controversial area, as a sample of the latest research listed by the new centre shows.
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Take the work of Dennis Embry of the Paxis Institute in Tucson, Arizona. He argues that we have overlooked the obvious: the purpose of terrorism is to create terror. This works best 鈥渋f the very symbols of everyday life become classically conditioned fear and anxiety stimuli鈥�. The top targets will be those most symbolic of a nation鈥檚 daily life, preferably served up for prime-time television. Crashing planes from United and American Airlines into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon from 8.46 am on met those objectives all too perfectly.
After the attacks, people stopped flying. Why? Not because they had made a rational risk assessment but because the mere thought of flying made their palms sweat. The classical conditioning methods so beloved of advertisers had been hijacked to create aversion to a daily activity.
Are there antidotes? Here the controversy grows fiercer. From terrorism to rail crashes, counselling and 鈥渄ebriefing鈥� are the standard response to help those caught up in disasters, even vicariously. 鈥淭he message counsellors will be on hand鈥� is almost mandatory in media reports of tragedies.
But there are growing doubts about their effectiveness. Take the study from Simon Wessely of Guy鈥檚, King鈥檚 and St Thomas鈥� School of Medicine in London and his colleagues, which concludes starkly: 鈥淭here is no current evidence that psychological debriefing is a useful treatment for the prevention of post-traumatic stress disorder after traumatic incidents. Compulsory debriefing of victims of trauma should cease.鈥�
What might be going wrong? Debriefing focuses on getting people to talk through the trauma and its emotional consequences soon after the incident. Could it be that some people are better off distancing themselves from what happened, rather than reliving it?
If disaster psychologists want to find better ways to help, they鈥檒l have to win the race between our understanding of human psychology and the terrorists鈥�.