Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

This morning, one of the Quarterback's friends posted as the status on his Facebook profile that he

hopes no more random media icons die today. But would someone please keep an eye on Robert Loggia?

(If you're like the Quarterback, you may want to click on the link to refresh your memory as to who that is, and then say, "Oh, him!").

My friend is suffering from a new disorder I am calling Multiple Celebrity Death Syndrome, or MCDS. And while my tongue is firmly in my cheek in creating a name for it, there is a phenomenon that is being caused by the death of so many celebrities in a relatively short amount of time, most recently Billy Mays.

As human beings, we are programmed to see patterns. Most of the time, this is useful. For example, if we notice that every time we see a tiger, a member of our group dies, it helps us learn to run away from tigers. On a more refined level, if we notice that members of our group are dying, it causes us to look and find out what the cause is so we can avoid it, whatever it may be. From an evolutionary standpoint, that's all good.

The problem is, we're actually pretty bad at figuring out when patterns aren't really patterns. We don't tend to assume that something can happen a bunch of times in a row by chance. For example, if you flip a coin three times and it comes up heads all three times, you are likely to have at least some suspicion that the coin isn't fair. But the chances of that happening at random are 1 in 8. The chances of it coming up the same all three times (without paying attention to heads specifically) are 1 in 4. We just think of that as being somehow "less random" than, say, heads-tails-tails (which also has a 1 in 8 chance).

So Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson and Billy Mays all died in the last 5 days, and we see a pattern. Celebrities seem to be dropping like flies. But in fact, people die every day, and some number of them are celebrities. I doubt we've come close to a number of celebrities dying in a short period to make it actually statistically unlikely to be random.

We see this a lot in crisis response, too. Groups of people start to feel "cursed." As my regular readers know, my own district crisis team got battered this past school year. And yes, I did see a pattern, but not one specific to my district or team. I saw a general uptick in critical incidents in the world. I don't even know if that is true.

I suppose it is possible that there is a general uptick in the death rate in the United States right now, and that the celebrities are caught in that wave. I doubt it, mostly because we're not also seeing news stories from coroners nationwide who suddenly are inundated with deaths from the general public. We want to see patterns, and the patterns we see scare us. But really, the recent celebrity deaths are just random, and noticeable because they're well publicized. On the one hand, it's worrying. On the other, we all just have MCDS.

N.B. There definitely has been an uptick in hoaxes reporting the death of various celebrities, including Jeff Goldblum and Miley Cyrus, both of whom are alive and well. It's possible that there aren't any more of those hoaxes than usual, we're just noticing them more because of our MCDS, or it's possible that hoaxters are taking advantage of the situation. At any rate, it's a good time to not believe everything you read!

The Quarterback is somewhat at a loss for a topic for today because apparently the only thing that happened yesterday is that Michael Jackson died. And while I certainly was sorry to hear that, the death of Michael Jackson is not, in point of fact, a "Critical Incident." This might be a good time to talk about what makes a critical incident, and what doesn't.

A critical incident is an event that overwhelms one's usual coping mechanisms. All of us have a set of skills that help us to deal with stressful situations. And all of us have some point past which we can't deal anymore. That point is when incidents become critical, and it is different for everyone.

Certainly there are some things that we can safely presume will constitute critical incidents for most people. Watching your spouse be murdered, for example, would overwhelm most people's ability to grieve and move on. And certainly there are some things that are generally not critical incidents for most people. For example, the death of an elderly grandparent after a long but not particularly painful illness is sad, but not usually overwhelming.

There are a lot of incidents that lie in the middle. What is intolerable for one person is within the realm of tolerable for another. One person may be seriously traumatized by a shooting in the neighborhood, while another is not, perhaps because it happens more frequently for them. As my frequent readers know, there are some predictors of traumatic stress: believing that you are going to die, sensory exposure to the event, triggering of past events, violation of your worldview and the involvement of children in the event are all predictive, but there are others that can cause trauma and these can all be there and a person still not be traumatized.

The death of Michael Jackson is not, for most people, a critical incident. It is sudden and perhaps shocking, and you may feel that it is sad. But it is within the realm of what most of us can cope with. It won't cause most of us nightmares or loss of appetite or drinking or depression. There may be exceptions, either for his family and close friends, those who were there when he died, or for people who have recent similar losses in their own lives. And if you are traumatized by it, that doesn't make you "wrong" or "crazy," just unusual.

Arguably, the death of Michael Jackson is more likely to be traumatizing than the death, also yesterday, of Farrah Fawcett. Hers was a long time coming, she was older, and she was ill, so it was not as sudden and perhaps not as shocking. But neither are likely to traumatize the general public.

Meanwhile, every family who did experience trauma this week now has an added wrinkle. The families of Neda Soltan and Ed Thomas will now add to their story, "and then Michael Jackson died, and everyone stopped looking at us very suddenly." This may be good and it may be bad. Most likely it will be some of each. But let's not lose sight of what a real critical incident really looks like.