Could hurricane coverage be hazardous to mental health?
Prolonged exposure to hurricane coverage may be hazardous to your mental health, according to a newly released study of nearly 1,500 Floridians before and after Hurricane Irma made landfall in the state in 2017.
The findings, made public on Friday, found that people who said they expected to be distressed and anxious after the storm were more likely to consume hurricane news — from print, TV, online and social media. And those who consumed more news were then more likely to suffer a range of post-traumatic stress symptoms after the storm, regardless of how much they were actually affected.
“That was the message — that media exposure was most important in determining their level of post-traumatic stress, not whether they were directly exposed to the hurricane or even in the evacuation zone,” said Roxane Cohen Silver, professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, and
senior author of the study.
The research, published in JAMA Network Open, is the first to examine people in the hours before a hurricane hits their community, starting 60 hours before Irma made landfall in Florida as a Category 4 storm. At that point, before the landfall on Sept. 10, 2017, Irma was a massive Category 5 storm, the most powerful seen in the Atlantic in over a decade. The entire state was within the projected path.
The storm killed 92 people in the U.S. and 42 in the Caribbean and caused $50 billion in damage.
The UC Irvine researchers followed up a month afterward to gauge levels of post-traumatic stress and anxiety. Previous studies had only queried people after the fact, said Silver, a research psychologist who has examined the link between media consumption and mental well-being since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Respondents, many of whom completed the online surveys by cell phone, ranged in age from 18 to 91 and were largely representative of Florida’s overall population.
While news reports of a pending disaster are essential to help people prepare, Silver said, it is the “excessive” consumption that can be harmful.
“Many of the images and reports are repetitious,” she said. “You’re not really learning much more information than you already have. So part of our message is that people should be attentive to their own consumption. It’s a message of moderation rather than abstinence.”
Candice Crawford, president and CEO of the Mental Health Association of Central Florida, said the findings were similar to a phenomenon her agency noted in the aftermath of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.
“We had people come to us who weren’t in the club that night but who were glued to the TV, watching the coverage for days, with the same images over and over and over,” Crawford said. “We have a category for them: ‘community members traumatized by Pulse.’ Their brains registered it as trauma, without ever experiencing it firsthand.”
In addition to individuals limiting their consumption of coverage, the California researchers suggested emergencymanagement and publichealth officials issue cautions on the “potential risk of sensationalized media coverage.”