Katrina Families Still in Distress

The Bush Administration has engaged in the most incredibly blatant demonstration of class warfare I can recall in my adult life. The poor people of New Orleans were always expendable and they continue to be.
Despite the media hue and cry initially, insufficient efforts continue. Children and families continue to suffer in poisonous FEMA trailers, in need of basic services, too many without school, without extended family support, without treatment for traumatic stress disorders.
Psychiatry News

Children were especially hard hit by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, traumatized by loss of their homes and communities and separation from families and friends, said Joy Osofsky, Ph.D., clinical director of Louisiana Spirit and a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry, and public health at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center (LSUHSC) School of Public Health. Louisiana Spirit offers crisis counseling to child and adolescent hurricane survivors in the state.


For children, distress varied with age; their history of trauma and loss; support received from family, school, and community; and by the trauma they experienced directly. All of this was compounded by pre-existing or subsequent poverty.


"These children were resilient if they were supported by their family and community, but those supports were devastated by the storm," said Osofsky. "The old networks of extended families were lost."


The LSUHSC, in collaboration with school systems, has screened 12,000 children, asking about their experiences and feelings in the wake of the storm. About 46 percent of the children interviewed were African American, 44 percent were white, 4 percent Hispanic, and 6 percent other.


By spring 2007, a majority of New Orleans students were still not back in the schools they had attended before the storm. They had moved an average of three times since the storm. Only 41 percent lived in their own homes while 27 percent lived in trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Half of these children had an unemployed parent, 45 percent had homes that were destroyed, and 90 percent had seen hurricane-related damage. Some still don't know where members of their extended families are.


In fall 2006, 41 percent of fourth through 12th graders continued to meet the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) cutoff score indicating a need for mental health services, though only 5 percent had actually received such services.


Among 787 younger children five months after the storm, 32 percent met the cutoff score for referral to mental health services, and 44 percent of parents had asked for counseling services. The LSU team reinterviewed 184 of those parents about 15 months after Katrina and found no significant changes in the children's mental health or the parents' desire for counseling services.