Hurricane Harvey survivors feel grief months later
Experts say emotional distress caused by such an event can take many forms
Deb Eberhart couldn’t sleep and was easily moved to tears as she worked to coordinate repairs to her Houston home in the months after flooding from Hurricane Harvey besieged it with 0.91 metre of water.
She clenched her jaw so hard that it hurt. She couldn’t eat.
“I thought: ‘Well, I’m not handling things as well as I should be,’” the 69-year-old retired teacher said. Eberhart realised she needed help that had nothing to do with construction crews and insurance adjusters.
So she joined storm survivors seeking help from therapists in the wake of the destructive winds and heavy rains in August that caused more than 80 deaths and an estimated $150 billion (Dh550 billion) in damage in Texas.
Free counselling
Experts say the emotional distress caused by such an event can take many forms — grief, anxiety, depression, even fear of storms — and progress through several stages over a year or longer. Even months after the storm hit, new patients have been coming to free counselling being offered by private and government-funded programmes.
In the small coastal town of Port Aransas, which experienced major destruction after Harvey made landfall nearby, psychologist Andrew Reichert said he began noticing a shift about a month ago in what was bringing people in.
“It’s gone from kind of the immediate stress and shock to more just kind of a chronic stress and long-haul type of thing,” Reichert said.
“A lot of my work is helping people prioritise and focus on what they can control versus what they can’t.”
Judith Andrews, a psychologist whose organisation is offering free counselling sessions, said survivors feel grief over the loss of both property and stability. “They’re grieving about the loss of what was,” she said.