Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Friday, January 28, 2011
The Challenger Disaster 25 Years On
Those of us of "a certain age" remember vividly where we were the day the space shuttle Challenger
exploded. It was January 28, 1986 -- 25 years ago today -- and by "certain age" I mostly mean the age such that we were in school 25 years ago. I myself was a junior in high school, and I was on a break from physics lab when a friend who was given to hyperbole ran up and said the space shuttle had exploded. No one believed him. By the end of the afternoon, we were all glued to the television watching the coverage, still gripped by disbelief, but knowing it was true.
Every generation, it seems, has a day like this -- a day where everyone remembers exactly where they were when they heard. For generations before ours, it was the Kennedy assassination, and, before that, Pearl Harbor. For the generation after, it was 9-11. In fact, I think it is now 9-11 for pretty much everyone.
Looking back, it seems almost quaint. The entire country came to a grinding halt 25 years ago because of the death of seven astronauts. The President postponed the State of the Union address by a week, and delivered a live address to the country from the oval office instead. It was a really big deal.
Twenty-five years later, it's hard to explain what was so gripping about this event. Yes, it was a tragedy. That we can tell just by reading about it. But the country didn't stop 17 years later when the Columbia exploded. Most people barely remember it. And compared to 9-11, the Challenger explosion seems incredibly small.
Twenty-five years ago, most of us thought of space travel as relatively safe. If you were in school then, you were too young to remember the Apollo 13 near-disaster or the earlier Apollo 1 launchpad fire. The space shuttle was still relatively new, it was cool and, on this particular mission, it was carrying the first teacher to space. A very large number of school children were watching the launch live on an upstart cable network called CNN when it exploded. The thing I remember most vividly was the palpable sense that things like that were not supposed to happen.
In 2011, we still don't like things like that to happen, but most of us know that they do. In the intervening 25 years, we've had another shuttle explosion, numerous mass shootings, the bombing of a Federal Building that killed 168 people including children, a massive Tsunami in Asia and several big earthquakes. Perhaps most importantly, we've had the 9-11 attacks. There is no way that the death of seven astronauts could seem like the worst thing that could happen when it is dwarfed by the memory of an event that killed more than 400 times as many people.
January 28, 1986 was a day that seriously challenged our collective worldview, which had been carefully rebuilt, one might argue, since the Kennedy assassination or, perhaps, the murders of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Having your worldview challenged is very painful and very memorable, and so we remember where we were that day. Our worldview as a country isn't so rosy twenty-five years later. One wonders how long it will take, or if it is even possible, to build it back again.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Calm Under Fire at the Discovery Channel
Last week, a man walked into the lobby of the Discovery Channel building in Silver Spring, Maryland and took three people hostage. He was heavily armed and had what appeared to be explosives strapped to him. The building was locked down and then evacuated. When the incident was over, the hostages were unharmed and the perpetrator was dead, shot by a law enforcement sniper.
So, imagine you're at work and a man with a gun and explosives comes in, yells a lot, tells people not to move, and you run. You call 911, from inside the building or from outside. What do you imagine you would say, and what would you sound like saying it? I'm not asking what you should say, or how you should act, but how do you imagine you would actually behave? I know I've had to call 911 for much less serious situations which were much less threatening to me personally, and while I say what needs to be said I am pretty agitated and upset.
Over the weekend, the 911 tapes from the Discovery Channel
incident were released. Clips were played on various television news broadcasts, and summaries were printed in the press. What is truly remarkable to me in listening to these is that the callers uniformly sound calm and are able to give extremely detailed descriptions of what is going on, what the man has in terms of weaponry, and how he acted when he entered the building. No one is crying. No one is screaming. No one is yelling for police to hurry. They say what needs to be said, they appear to be very accurate, and they remain calm.To what can we attribute this calm and accuracy on the part of people who had just narrowly escaped being killed? There are probably a number of things at work here. First of all, the man who was responsible for this was a known quantity. He had been arrested outside the building before and, until two weeks before, was under a court order to stay away. His picture was posted around the building as someone to look out for. This means that when people called 911 and described him, they weren't only working from what they had just seen, but also from pictures they had seen and information stored in their long-term memory.
Having pictures of this man posted around the office also served another purpose. On some level, everyone who worked at the Discovery Channel and saw those pictures had considered the possibility that something like this might happen some day. They may not have believed it, and they may not have imagined the specific details, but the thought that this man was dangerous and could harm them had already crossed their mind. When it actually happened, they didn't have to process something brand new. Instead of thinking, "Something horrible is happening and I don't know what to do with it," they could think, "The horrible thing that I feared is happening." That left more brain power available to notice the details.
My daughter also points out another important fact*. When we're scared, our senses are heightened and our memory for what we perceive is also heightened. This can turn out not to be very helpful, because we often remember the wrong things. In this case, however, it seems that people remembered the right things.
Finally, it's important to note that feeling out of control and acting out of control are not the same thing. We can imagine that, under these circumstances, we'd be scared out of our minds. And certainly being scared out of our minds can affect how we act. But people often experience a remarkable ability to do what needs to be done in an emergency, and fall apart later. Bravery does not mean not being scared. It means doing what you need to do even though you're scared. I think we can all agree, there are a lot of brave people over at the Discovery Channel.
* You know you're bringing your work home when your 12-year-old child can analyze a crisis situation and come up with insightful commentary!
Ross Douthat at the New York Times
had an excellent piece yesterday about what we should -- and should not -- draw from the politics of the perpetrator in this incident. I highly recommend it.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Another Death at an Oakland BART Station
A man was shot and killed this morning by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART
) and Oakland police officers near the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland, California. If this rings a bell with you, you're not crazy -- just over a week ago a former BART officer was found guilty of manslaughter in the shooting death of a man at the Fruitvale station on New Years Day, 2009. That conviction -- or more specifically the conviction on manslaughter rather than murder -- spurred protests and looting in Oakland.On the one hand, these two shootings have nothing to do with each other. The officers involved are different. The people shot are different. The circumstances of the shootings are different. The only connection is one of coincidence -- both of these incidents happened near the same station.
On the other hand, in terms of impact these two shootings have everything to do with each other. The coincidence of location means that today's shooting immediately brings to mind the earlier incident and the recent trial. An officer involved shooting in Oakland, California does not merit national headlines as a general rule. It is the similarities between the two cases, as superficial as they may be, that get CNN
involved.There is no reason, at least from the initial media reports, to believe that there was anything suspect about the circumstances surrounding today's shooting. The same could not be said about the shooting in 2009. But our minds have a funny way of categorizing things. The 2009 shooting is filed in our memories under any number of categories you might expect -- police shootings
, police brutality, riots, protests -- but also under some that aren't nearly as helpful, such as: Fruitvale, BART and Oakland Police. Today's shooting may only share those last three labels with the one in 2009, but because we are opening the "file drawer" where both reside, both come out and their import can become confused. The general public, furthermore, are not the only ones making these connections. While no police officer wants to shoot and kill a suspect under any circumstances, there is, perhaps, no worse nightmare for an officer in Oakland, California than to shoot and kill a suspect near the Fruitvale BART station, especially this week. Whatever emotions or reactions a shooting would cause to begin with are compounded because the officers' minds immediately and involuntarily make the connection. The natural questions (whether acknowledged or not) an officer might ask of himself about whether a shooting was necessary or justified are complicated by the fact that, because of the links between the two cases, on some level our minds do not believe a shooting at the Fruitvale station can ever be justified no matter the circumstances. Add to that the fact that the officers involved know that the public is making those same connections, and it makes a stressful situation that much worse.
There are plenty of investigations going on about today's shooting, as there should be. Hopefully, in time, we will know for sure whether it could have been avoided or not. It might help keep tensions in the community down and police officer's mental health in tact if we all took a deep breath and reminded ourselves that whether this was a justified shooting or not has nothing, no matter what our minds tell us, to do with the fact that it happened near Fruitvale. Coincidences are complicated, but sometimes they really are just coincidences.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Taking it Personally: Guilty Verdict in the Seattle Jewish Federation Shooting
On July 28, 2006, a man took held a teenage girl at gunpoint, forced his way into the Seattle Jewish Federation offices and started shooting. One woman was killed and five others were injured. The gunman, who had a history of mental illness, told a dispatcher he was tired of Jews, Israel and American foreign policy, and he was hoping to get on CNN. Today, a jury rejected his insanity defense and found him guilty at his second trial (the first one ended in a hung jury).
This was not the first shooting at a place associated with Judaism in the United States, and it was not the last. Over the last 15 years or so, security has been increasing steadily at synagogues, community centers and museums. Here in Ann Arbor, you have to show picture ID to get into the Jewish Community Center. Many synagogues have police presence during holiday services.
All of us who frequent Jewish community buildings know why the extra security is there. At the same time, we don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. We tell ourselves that it's to guard against something that, realistically, isn't going to happen anyway. We know there are those "out there" who, because of ignorance or illness, think that shooting at Jews is a good thing to do. We just don't think they are anywhere near us.
I remember distinctly how I felt when I heard about the shooting in Seattle. My family lived in Seattle for four months about ten years ago, and we've visited several times, so I felt some connection. More than that, however, I remember imagining very vividly what the scene must have looked like. I placed the shooting in my mind at building that looked just like the local JCC. I could very much picture what happened and where it happened, even though I'd never been there and the building in Seattle probably looks nothing like this.
This is what having a personal connection to a traumatic event does to us. While everyone who heard about this event knew it was terrible, those of us with ties to the Jewish community had much easier access to the details of what made it awful. Anyone can, if they try, put themselves in a traumatic scene in their mind's eye. We just got there much more easily.
I was therefore somewhat surprised when I read about the verdict in this case. I wasn't surprised that the jury found the gunman guilty, although I don't have enough of the details to have an opinion about whether he was legally insane or not. What surprised me was that, before I read about the verdict, I had totally forgotten about this incident. Part of what allows me to go to my Temple on a regular basis is the ability to not vividly imagine an actual shooting when I do, and so my mind has given itself permission to file this away until needed.
Nevertheless, when I heard about the verdict, I immediately saw that same scene that I had imagined 3 years ago in my mind. For me, that is what represents the trauma of this shooting. Oddly, I have a vivid visual memory of something that I never saw. In a few days or weeks, the Seattle shooting will be filed away again. Soon enough, I and many other people, will convince ourselves that we are guarding against something that, realistically, isn't going to happen anyway. Until the next time.
Note: The picture above is of Pam Waechter, the director of the Seattle Jewish Federation's annual campaign, who was killed in the shooting. Ms. Waechter was a Jew by choice, having been raised Lutheran. As Richard Silverstein wrote at the time,
It is terribly ironic that a woman who elects to convert to Judaism in order to share the joy and fate of the Jewish people should pay the ultimate price for that commitment.May her memory be a blessing.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Sometimes trauma has a Little t
My daughter tells me it wasn't a year ago, it was a year less 11 days, but to me it was exactly a year ago, because it was the day before Rosh Hashanah. My secretary walked right into a meeting in my office -- something she never does -- and told me that my daughter was on her way and had hurt her wrist. I walked into the main portion of the office and peeked out the window at my 10 year-old, whose cries I could already hear. I could see her walking with a friend, her arm poking out of her sweater with her wrist looking curved in all sorts of places that wrists are not supposed to curve. It was obviously broken. She had fallen off the monkey bars on the playground and landed on her arm. As it turned out, her arm was broken in the wrist and above the elbow. She required surgery that night and two days in the hospital, with me sleeping on the couch beside her.
Was this a critical incident? Hard to say. A critical incident is one which has the capacity to overwhelm your usual coping skills. This was certainly more obviously a trauma for my daughter than for me, but at the same time it was more emotionally distressing to me than it was to her. She wasn't scared so much as she was wanting the pain to stop. I was scared for her and coping with the violation of my belief that I could protect my children from harm.
The first clue that this incident overwhelmed my coping skills comes when we compare this incident to one that happened a couple of weeks earlier. Another child came in from the playground having fallen from a swing, his arm also obviously broken. While the office manager called the father, I worked with other staff to carefully immobilize the arm so dad could safely take the child to the hospital. When my own daughter was the victim, however, I simply grabbed my purse and ushered her to the car. I didn't assess the injury, I didn't splint it, and I left my keys on my desk inside. When the ER resident put her x-rays up for me to see I was horrified, both because of how graphic the elbow break was and because it was clear that I should not have driven her myself, and certainly not without immobilizing the injury.
Another hint that this was traumatic for me is the vivid sensory memories it holds. I can play it in my mind like a slideshow: the sight of her wrist . . . the sound of her begging me to touch her fingers in the car because she couldn't feel them . . . the feeling of lifting her into the wheelchair . . . the scene of them cutting off her sweater . . . the sight of the x-rays . . . the sound of her teacher on the phone saying, "if I could have flown across the playground, I would have caught her" . . . the smile on the doctor's face after surgery . . . the taste of the dinner my friend brought me . . . the sight of the "relaxation station" the hospital placed by her bed with gentle lights shining in the darkness.
If you ask my daughter about that day, she talks about it fairly calmly. If you ask me, I shudder visibly. It was worse for her physically, but for me emotionally. It's a good reminder that the people most impacted are not always who you might think, that sometimes trauma isn't Trauma, and also . . . be careful on the monkey bars.
May all the Quarterbackers out there be inscribed for a sweet, healthy, happy and trauma-free New Year.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Eight Years Out
It was a Tuesday. I don't know why I know it was a Tuesday, but I do. The fact that I do tells you the impact that that day had on me, since the only other days of a year or more ago for which I remember the day of the week are the days each of my children were born and the day I was married. And that last one probably shouldn't count, since Jewish weddings are almost always on a Sunday, at least where I'm from.
It was a Tuesday and the kids were lined up for the bathroom when I heard. And when I talked to my husband on the phone I was sitting in the corner of the office looking at a garbage can. I can still see it in my mind. I can hear my daughter's daycare teacher telling me they were closing, and forgetting to tell me who was calling, first. I can still feel -- not just remember feeling, but actually experience feeling -- the brief terror when I heard an airplane go over my house in the afternoon and realized there were not supposed to be planes in the air, and I ran from the third floor of my house to the first before I realized it was an Air Force jet. I can also see the sign on Rita's Italian Ice saying they were closed for the rest of the day. What I remember perhaps even more vividly is putting my daughter, aged 3 1/2 years, to bed a few weeks later and reassuring her that our house was a safe place, that we were safe, and leaving her room and saying, "OK, now she feels safe. Who's going to make me feel safe?"
Absolutely everyone has at least some memories like this. This was a national, group trauma. And while we all experienced it differently, and certainly some of us experienced it much more directly than others, virtually no one over the age of about 13 doesn't remember it, or doesn't thing it affected them.
Trauma violates our worldview. That day violated the notion that many of us still had that this was a safe country, that we were personally not in danger, and that getting up in the morning and going to work was a reasonably safe activity. It happened in specific cities, but it happened in all of our living rooms, to all of us. That was the intent of it in the first place -- to terrorize. It is small wonder that most of us still can have those sensory memories triggered by something or other.
If you think this analysis is overblown, or overly dramatic -- if you think the effect on us collectively was not that great -- consider this. Nowhere in this post have I mentioned what day I remember so vividly. But you all knew anyway.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The Metro vs. Mott: Closeness is Relative
Yesterday, two stories hit the news that caught the Quarterback's attention. Unless you live in Southeast Michigan (and for many of you, even if you live in Southeast Michigan) you probably only heard about one.
The first story came in the morning. A worker constructing the new C.S.Mott Children's Hospital at the University of Michigan Medical Center was killed by falling debris. The second story you've undoubtedly heard. Two cars on the Washington, D.C. Metro collided at the Maryland border, killing 9 and injuring many more.
On the face of it, the hospital construction accident is literally much closer to home for the Quarterback, who lives in Ann Arbor, MI. Both of my children have been hospitalized at Mott, my son was born next door, and my husband and a number of friends are medical center employees. And yet, I found myself following the coverage of the D.C. crash much more closely. Why?
In this situation, the way our brains are wired to acquire new information is truly working against us. Whenever we learn something new, we try to fit it into what we already know. If we imagine our brains and our memories as a gigantic collection of file cabinets, it is much more efficient to file new information in an existing drawer than it is to build a whole new cabinet.
When I heard the news about the construction death, I opened the drawer marked "Mott hospital." I felt a connection, but not any fear. Nowhere in that drawer is there anyone who is working on the construction site. My connection did not travel anywhere near the death of the worker, it only went by way of the physical location.
When I heard about the train crash, my brain opened the drawer marked "D.C. Metro rider." And found all the times I myself have ridden the Metro, as well as my in-laws, cousins and friends who live in Washington and ride the Metro every day. Even though I could be 99% certain, based on the location of the crash, that none of them were affected, I was pulling out the file that told me they could have been -- the file that said I could have been, too. So my reaction was stronger. If I or someone in my close circle were a construction worker, the reverse might well have been true.
Being close to an event doesn't mean physical proximity. It means identifying with it. Closeness is relative in more ways than one. Thank goodness, the Quarterback's relatives are safe.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Miracle on the Hudson
As predicted, news gets in the way of my well-crafted plans!
Today, Congress starts hearings on the so-called "Miracle on the Hudson," the landing of US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River on January 15, 2008. Congress apparently wants to know what went wrong (e.g. why did geese bring down a plane?) and what went right (e.g. how did the plane manage to land on the river successfully and everyone get off with only one serious injury and no deaths).
This is a great opportunity for the Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback to review this incident from a Critical Incident Stress Management point of view. It's important to note that I have no idea what services were offered to the crew or passengers following this incident. I have to imagine the crew got something from the airline, although I do know that US Airways, because it is not hooked into the Association of Airline Pilots, did not get support through their CISM team.
The thing that might surprise you (or maybe it doesn't) is that, according to news reports, both the crew and the air traffic controller who was responsible for the flight suffered serious traumatic stress symptoms following this incident. The flight attendants reported not being able to even consider putting on their uniforms afterwards. One didn't return to work for a month or more and another, who was the injury on the flight, didn't return at all.
On the face of this you might be surprised that someone could be traumatized in an incident where nobody died. But, in fact, someone actually dying isn't all that great a predictor of traumatic stress. What is a good predictor, however, is the individual believing that he or she was going to die. And certainly the crew had every reason to fear that they were about to die. Water landings are not generally successful. That's why this was the "miracle on the Hudson." And even if the crew had hope they would make it, the notion that someone was going to die had to have been on their minds.
It's entirely possible their stress symptoms would have been worse if someone had died, but not necessarily. One of the key questions we ask in CISM is "what is the worst part of this for you?" and the answers are sometimes surprising. What really sticks with one person is not what sticks with another.
Another interesting case here is the air traffic controller. I heard an interview with him on the radio recently, and he pointed out that while everyone else was celebrating the successful landing, he was off in a corner thinking he had just lost a plane. The last thing he heard was Captain Sullenberger telling him they were going into the Hudson. That's not good. He had responsibility for all of 145 passengers on board and all of the crew, and as far as he knew they were dead. He said he actually didn't believe it when someone told him they had made it. Again, the stressful issue wasn't what happened, it was what he believed was going to happen.
I have to imagine that the recovery of all of these folks was complicated by the fact that they were being celebrated as heroes. On the one hand, they deserved the praise. On the other hand, they probably weren't feeling like heroes, they were feeling like a quivering mess. And no one expected them to be having trouble, which makes it harder to get the support you need. I hope they got it, and I hope they're doing well. They did a great job, but that doesn't make it easy.
As an aside, I note in the CNN story that Congress is having only one passenger testify, and that they found many conflicting accounts from the passengers about what happened. This in itself is a stress symptom. All of these passengers, who also believed they were going to die, focused in a very tunneled way on what was important to them. Time slowed and they lost focus on what they perceived as extraneous events. They aren't dumb, they aren't lying and they don't have bad memories, their brains just did not encode all of what happened properly. That's a defense mechanism -- anything that wasn't important to keeping them alive got pushed aside. I hope these folks got some CISM support as well, if only to let them know they're not crazy.
Today, Congress starts hearings on the so-called "Miracle on the Hudson," the landing of US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River on January 15, 2008. Congress apparently wants to know what went wrong (e.g. why did geese bring down a plane?) and what went right (e.g. how did the plane manage to land on the river successfully and everyone get off with only one serious injury and no deaths).
This is a great opportunity for the Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback to review this incident from a Critical Incident Stress Management point of view. It's important to note that I have no idea what services were offered to the crew or passengers following this incident. I have to imagine the crew got something from the airline, although I do know that US Airways, because it is not hooked into the Association of Airline Pilots, did not get support through their CISM team.
The thing that might surprise you (or maybe it doesn't) is that, according to news reports, both the crew and the air traffic controller who was responsible for the flight suffered serious traumatic stress symptoms following this incident. The flight attendants reported not being able to even consider putting on their uniforms afterwards. One didn't return to work for a month or more and another, who was the injury on the flight, didn't return at all.
On the face of this you might be surprised that someone could be traumatized in an incident where nobody died. But, in fact, someone actually dying isn't all that great a predictor of traumatic stress. What is a good predictor, however, is the individual believing that he or she was going to die. And certainly the crew had every reason to fear that they were about to die. Water landings are not generally successful. That's why this was the "miracle on the Hudson." And even if the crew had hope they would make it, the notion that someone was going to die had to have been on their minds.
It's entirely possible their stress symptoms would have been worse if someone had died, but not necessarily. One of the key questions we ask in CISM is "what is the worst part of this for you?" and the answers are sometimes surprising. What really sticks with one person is not what sticks with another.
Another interesting case here is the air traffic controller. I heard an interview with him on the radio recently, and he pointed out that while everyone else was celebrating the successful landing, he was off in a corner thinking he had just lost a plane. The last thing he heard was Captain Sullenberger telling him they were going into the Hudson. That's not good. He had responsibility for all of 145 passengers on board and all of the crew, and as far as he knew they were dead. He said he actually didn't believe it when someone told him they had made it. Again, the stressful issue wasn't what happened, it was what he believed was going to happen.
I have to imagine that the recovery of all of these folks was complicated by the fact that they were being celebrated as heroes. On the one hand, they deserved the praise. On the other hand, they probably weren't feeling like heroes, they were feeling like a quivering mess. And no one expected them to be having trouble, which makes it harder to get the support you need. I hope they got it, and I hope they're doing well. They did a great job, but that doesn't make it easy.
As an aside, I note in the CNN story that Congress is having only one passenger testify, and that they found many conflicting accounts from the passengers about what happened. This in itself is a stress symptom. All of these passengers, who also believed they were going to die, focused in a very tunneled way on what was important to them. Time slowed and they lost focus on what they perceived as extraneous events. They aren't dumb, they aren't lying and they don't have bad memories, their brains just did not encode all of what happened properly. That's a defense mechanism -- anything that wasn't important to keeping them alive got pushed aside. I hope these folks got some CISM support as well, if only to let them know they're not crazy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Meet the Quarterback
- Naomi Zikmund-Fisher
- is a clinical social worker, former school Principal and a Crisis Consultant for schools and community organizations. You can learn more about her at www.SchoolCrisisConsultant.com
Subscribe
Posts
All Comments