The Columbia Disaster

Could the shuttle explosion reignite your old anxieties?

By Colin Allen, published on February 01, 2003

Americans' attention was torn from the growing conflict in Iraq this Saturday, February 1, when the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded over the skies of Texas. Now, 17 years after the Challenger explosion, many are struggling to understand what went wrong minutes before the shuttle's landing. Public reaction to this tragedy is markedly different from NASA's 1986 disaster. This time, the accident may seem worse for those suffering anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because they never fully recovered from September 11.

"One of the greatest predisposing factors of developing PTSD is prior PTSD or life-threatening trauma," says Mark Levy, M.D., a professor at the University of California at San Francisco. In the study of anxiety and PTSD, this concept is known as kindling. When a person suffers anxiety over time, the level of shock that triggers anxiety becomes progressively lower. If anxiety remains untreated, a person can remain in a perpetual state of stress.

"[September 11] is the high-water mark for vulnerability in our modern life," says Levy. "If Twin Towers is a 100, this is a 60." The worry of Levy and other psychologists is that even though the Columbia explosion was not traumatic for many—except for those close to the astronauts—the threshold for anxiety is now much lower. "You get an increasingly jittery population," says Levy. Bad news like the shuttle's explosion may only make people more hypervigilant and unduly stressed. "A sad scenario for our future is the Israelization of the American population," he says.