The Human Connection and the Government Disconnnect

According to Alan Manevitz, a psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital and an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder, during the aftermath of disaster, a doctor’s role evolves: "At first, you act like just a fellow human being," he said. "Then as a physician." Manevitz was at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center attacks and he is now in in Gulfport Mississippi at the Health Department Command Center (New York Times, September 11, 2005) .

Last night I was given a copy of On the Ground After September 11, a collection of accounts by people in the mental health field who responded to the September 11, 2001 crisis. About 65 authors have contributed their stories, their responses and their own emotional reactions to bring us as readers into the web of connectedness that characterizes the response to 9/11. The book has over 100 chapters, and is more than 600 pages long, so I have barely dipped into its contents, but already I am engaged, mainly because the mental health workers tell their stories as connected people. First they are human beings. Their humanness connects them to the people they help, and to each other. And then they are able to provide service. I have two running partners who have contributed to this book, Ellen Stoller and Louise Klaber. Look for their stories.

Obviously and sadly the release of this book is timely. Yesterday a Health Advocacy student sent me a link to Adele Stan’s blog. Stan posted an article written by an anonymous and very experienced psychologist who volunteered her services in Dallas at the Convention Center and Reunion Arena. She is angry and frustrated by the lack of coordination, of official response, of real help. “No one is in charge, she shouts.” And then she makes the link between 9/11 and Katrina we are all afraid to think about:

The government has failed!!! We are more vulnerable now than before 9/11 because faith in the system is gone. No system can sustain itself as a viable entity when the citizenry are the walking wounded. Victims implode a system from within and expose its decay. This is the beginning of the end unless we can get a drastic change of philosophy and restore the government to a system "by the people for the people." Right now nobody down here believes we have that.