Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

As you all know, on Tuesday night a man walked into a fitness class at a gym outside Pittsburgh, turned off the lights, took out a gun and opened fire, killing three women and injuring many more before killing himself. I posted about this a few hours later from my perspective as a former Pittsburgher with friends in the 'Burgh.

As is often the case in highly publicized mass shootings, there's a lot of "woulda shoulda coulda" in this situation. The shooter had been planning this a long time, had done several "dry runs" of one kind or another, and had a blog that was pretty explicit about what he intended to do. It's hard to wrap our head around the notion that no one saw this coming. And would you want to be the gym employee who showed him, when he asked, how to turn out the lights? It's awful.

Because I came to this story from the perspective of a former Pittsburgher, I was somewhat surprised at how much of an impression this story made on the rest of the country. I had taken "ownership" of this incident from the perspective of my own history, but many more people identified with being in a fitness class. The most chilling thing I heard was a discussion on NPR's "Talk of the Nation." The host, Neal Conan, remarked that many women heard the news and said, "That could have been me." Rene Balcer, head writer for NBC's "Law & Order" commented,

But it's interesting, the reaction that could be me, because there are probably a lot of people who might be thinking of that gunman and saying that could have been me. . . Because, you know, one of the things that one of my detectives has said is, you know, bad men do what good men dream.

I don't know if I agree with Mr. Balcer on this one. It certainly doesn't resonate with me personally, but perhaps I'm simply not of the right background. Maybe women in this instance identify with the victims and men may identify with the shooter (and maybe not -- male readers, what do you think?)

But all of this got me to thinking. Incidents like this are a nationally shared experience. We aren't all traumatized as the people who were there are, but on a national level we have heard the same horrifying news and identified in a personal way with it. Perhaps the greatest example of this, of course, was 9-11, when the whole country suffered secondary trauma en masse.

When we do Critical Incident Stress Debriefings (CISD) with those involved in traumatic incidents, one of the most powerful and beneficial things that happens is that participants realize they can support each other. This small, homogeneous group has gone through a common experience, but often they have kept to themselves in trying to process it. CISD helps them realize that they went through it together and they can be together in dealing with it too. Because different people tend to struggle with different aspects of an incident, they can offer each other perspective from someone who has truly "been there."

Wouldn't it be nice if our society supported us in being able to do that with these shared traumas? What if the conversation could get past, "Wow, that was freaky" and into, "I'm having trouble with this, are you?" What if being freaked out wasn't just something to say, it was something to get help from friends and colleagues about. We don't really like to talk about our feelings in this society. It's seen as a sign of weakness and instability. And as a result, we deprive ourselves of the best coping resource there is out there -- each other.

We've all heard of a Monday Morning Quarterback. They're the folks who stand around the water cooler the day after football Sunday and expound on what the team should have done.

Well, I'm not much of a Monday Morning Quarterback in the traditional sense. I don't watch much football and I don't know whether the team did what they needed to do or not. Any expounding I do on Monday has to do with the ads that ran during the SuperBowl. But that's another blog.

This is not the Monday Morning Quarterback blog, it's the Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback blog. In this blog, I will be expounding on the various critical incidents and traumatic events in the news and how they are being handled from a mental health point of view.

Like most Monday Morning Quarterbacks, it is much easier for me to give advice looking backwards than it is to respond to a crisis as it is unfolding. I have only the utmost respect for those who choose crisis intervention as their life's work, and for those who have crisis intervention thrust upon them without any training or preference on their part at all.

It is the nature of traumatic events that, if we're lucky, any one person will only have to deal with a couple in their lifetime. That makes it hard to learn from our past experiences and use them to do better in the future. And yet, that is the nature of true learning. So what are we to do? Those of us who care about -- or just worry about -- crisis response must learn from other people's experiences, so all of us can stand on each other's shoulders when our own "big one" comes along.

My plan is to write in the next post or two about the global response to H1N1 -- again, looking at it from a critical incident stress point of view. Of course, if something happens in the news that could change my plans. Stay tuned.