New Orleans – Michael Gowland says he had never been a big crier.
“I’m not a Neanderthal,” he said last week, “but I wasn’t much for tears.” Now, sometimes, he cries two or three hours at a stretch. Other times, his temper has exploded.
“If anyone had told me before that depression could bring me this low, I’d have said they were a phony,” Gowland, 46, said during a break from fixing his flooded home. “Everything bothers me.”
More than two years after Hurricane Katrina, the persistent frustrations of the delayed recovery are exacting a high psychological toll on people who never before had such troubles, a major study says. A burst of adrenaline and hope propelled many through the first months but, with so many neighborhoods still semi-deserted, inspiration has ended.
Calls to a mental-health hotline jumped after the storm and have remained high, organizers said. Psychiatrists report being overbooked. And the most thorough survey of the Gulf Coast’s mental health recently showed that while signs of depression and other ills doubled after the hurricane, two years later, those levels have risen.
“It’s really stunning in juxtaposition to what these kinds of surveys have shown after other disasters,” said Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School, who led the study. Typically, “people have a lot of trouble the first night and the first month. Then you see a lot of improvement.”
But in New Orleans the percentage of people reporting severe mental illness, suicidal thoughts and post-traumatic stress disorder increased between March 2006 and summer 2007, the survey showed.
“A lot of people had this expectation in New Orleans that, ‘By next Mardi Gras we’re going to be back’ … and then they weren’t,” Kessler said. “Then they said, ‘By next year we’ll be back’ and they weren’t. We’re in this stage of where there are a lot of people just kind of giving up.”
Storm fades
Gulf Coast residents breathed a sigh of relief Saturday after a tropical depression came ashore in the Florida panhandle, then weakened, sparing them their first serious brush with tropical weather since two hurricanes ravaged the region in 2005.
Forecasters downgraded the threat when the storm system moved ashore Friday night near Fort Walton Beach, Fla., with top sustained winds of 35 mph.
