Don’t leave quake brains untreated

Many Cantabrians will recognise the symptoms – forgetfulness, an inability to focus, difficulty in completing simple tasks, anxiety, irritability, insomnia. This is ‘‘quake brain’’, something we have often talked about since the earthquakes of 2010-2011. Now, results from a scientific study suggest it is a measurable phenomenon.

The study was conducted by the University of Otago’s department of psychological medicine in Christchurch two years after the February 2011 earthquake. It found that a group of people who were affected by the quake made more errors learning their way through a maze than people who were not affected. The quake-affected group had all suffered degrees of trauma, including damage to their property or neighbourhood, injured relatives, or as emergency service responders.

The idea that traumatic events impair cognitive function has long been studied, and debated. Peer-reviewed studies have been conducted among groups as diverse as Vietnam War veterans, emergency service responders to the 9/11 attacks and elderly people forced out of their homes by the March 2011 quake in Japan.

Even though the studies have used different methodologies and groups of people, they commonly found cognitive impairment among people who had been exposed to trauma. The good news is that the impairment seemed to decrease over time and, in the Japanese study, walking for exercise and being busy outside the home was helpful.

However, the psychological effects of trauma are not clearcut. A long-term study among firefighters who battled the Australian bushfires of 1983 suggested that treatment for a psychological disorder before the event was a more accurate predictor of later problems. There is still much to be learned.

Such uncertainty is why a follow-up to the Christchurch research would be useful. The University of Otago team is trying to obtain funding to study whether the same people’s memory functions are still impaired, or have returned to normal. Such a study deserves to be supported, as does other research on the wider psychological impacts of the earthquakes.

The sad truth is that ‘‘quake brain’’ may be the least of our mental health worries. It exists on a spectrum of disorders which include post-traumatic stress, anxiety, substance abuse and suicide risk. In the words of Canterbury police district commander John Price, whose officers often have to deal with the consequences, ‘‘you’ve got to rebuild your people as well as your buildings’’ after an earthquake.

This, however, is a problem that the Ministry of Health and its minister, Jonathan Coleman, continue wilfully to diminish. Mental health funding in Canterbury is about to drop to $210 per head of population, compared with $250 nationally.

The ‘‘quake brain’’ phenomenon which so many people recognise is like the canary in the coal mine – a harbinger of an emerging danger that could become very serious indeed if left unattended.

If a group of people who suffered quake trauma could make 13 per cent more errors in solving a maze puzzle, two years after the event, just try to imagine the enormous wider effects on a whole population mentally overburdened with trying to rebuild shattered lives.

More attention to psychological recovery should have been part of the earthquake rebuild all along.