The scenes of death and destruction in Haiti bring to mind descriptions of the Black Death, which killed a third of the population of Europe and Asia more than six centuries ago, beginning in 1353. The Florentine writer, Boccaccio, wrote of the effects of the plague with words that could be taken from the reports of today: "As consecrated ground there was not in extent sufficient to provide tombs for the vast multitude of corpses which day and night, and almost every hour, were brought in eager haste to the churches for interment, least of all, if ancient custom were to be observed and a separate resting-place assigned to each, they dug, for each graveyard, as soon as it was full, a huge trench, in which they laid the corpses as they arrived by hundreds at a time, piling them up as merchandise is stowed in the hold of a ship, tier upon tier, each covered with a little earth, until the trench would hold no more."
The scenes of death and destruction are horrible in themselves, and I hope everyone is doing what they can do to help financially, but there will also be emotional consequences for all involved--for the Haitian survivors as well as the aide workers and reporters who are now the ones who will continue to suffer from the experience. All the living, from an orphaned Haitian child to luminaries such as Brian Williams or Bill Clinton cannot be unaffected emotionally--as were the people of Florence so long ago: "Nor, for all their number, were their obsequies honored by either tears or lights or crowds of mourners; rather, it was come to this, that a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat would be to-day. From all which it is abundantly manifest, that that lesson of patient resignation, which the sages were never able to learn from the slight and infrequent mishaps which occur in the natural course of events, was now brought home even to the minds of the simple by the magnitude of their disasters, so that they became indifferent to them."
The people of Haiti who survive--after their physical needs are met--will have a legacy of a lifetime of memories of the horror, as will many of the aid workers and journalists now on the scene.
There will be decades of post traumatic stress disorder and other psychological aftershocks for many who come into contact with this catastrophe. And one legacy of the earthquake will be a continuing call for mental health intervention and support for the people of Haiti and throughout the world as the thousands of workers and reporters eventually return home.
Thousands will live lives punctuated by nightmares, panic attacks, and flash backs--in addition to a host of physical symptoms.
More subtle emotional consequences will include: Guilt--Why did I survive and the rest of my family die? Why couldn't I do more to alleviate the suffering? Anxiety--a general sense of unease. Dysphoria--an ability to take pleasure from everyday activities of living. There will also be depression, insomnia, anger management problems, and, as Boccaccio himself noted, numbness and indifference.
Although one cannot argue against the idea that the physical needs of the survivors are paramount--and for such poor people, emotional distress is arguably a luxury after their bellies are filled, and they find shelter, I would like to put in a little brief for help for the soul as well as the body--for Haitian in Haiti, and Haitian everywhere, and for those helpers and journalists whose lives may never be the same.
Or to put it more bluntly: Let's hope for a Haiti where the living don't wish they were dead.
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