Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Abby Sunderland, 16, has been found safe, floating on her de-masted boat in the Indian Ocean.  Abby's parents had lost contact with her early Thursday morning Pacific Time as she sailed through gusty winds and high waves on her quest to become the youngest person to sail around the world solo.  Shortly after her communications went out, she activated two emergency beacons on her boat, indicating that something else was wrong.  A Quantas airliner spotted her about 20 hours later with the mast of her boat gone.  She appears to be unharmed, and a fishing boat is headed to pick her up.

When this is all over, who in this story do you imagine might show some post-traumatic stress symptoms?  Whose coping mechanisms may have been overwhelmed during these 20 hours of uncertainty?

I'd like to suggest that it isn't Abby Sunderland.  During the 20 hours after her mast snapped, Abby Sunderland knew, the entire time, that she was OK.  She was disappointed, certainly, that her sailing journey was over.  She was worried, I'd guess, about the storms and about how soon help would arrive.  This was close to the worst for which she was prepared, but Abby Sunderland was prepared for this, and she was OK.

The same cannot necessarily be said for her parents.  During those 20 hours, unlike Abby, her parents did not know if she was OK.  In many cases, uncertainty is much more difficult to deal with than the facts, even when the facts are horrible.  When people don't know what has happened or what will happen, they think through all of the possibilities. 

In this case, Abby's parents probably imagined she was dead, she was alive and floating in the ocean, she was seriously injured, and maybe 100 other possible scenarios including the one that turned out to be true.  While they were imagining all of those things, not knowing which, if any, had happened, their minds had to try to cope with all of them at once.  That's an awful lot to process, and might easily overwhelm your coping skills.  It's actually harder than knowing that, say, she actually is seriously injured.  If she were seriously injured and they knew that, they would have to deal with it.  When they imagine that she's injured but also imagine that she's dead, or freezing, or drowning, the have to deal with all of those things, not just the one.

I am reminded of a story my father used to tell about getting separated from his grandmother in Central Park when he was a boy.  When she found him, she referred to him as having been "lost."  He adamantly insisted that he had not been lost -- he knew where he was the whole time.  He was sure it was his grandmother who had been lost. 

Abby Sunderland is most likely not traumatized because she knew she was OK.  I don't know the Sunderland family or how they coped with all of this.  I would certainly want to assess that before deciding they need help.  They are, however, much more at risk than Abby.  After all, Abby knew exactly where she was the whole time.

image: LA Times

He had compassion fatigue. He was a Muslim. He had money problems. He was depressed. He was disgruntled. He didn't want to deploy. He was a terrorist. He was harassed. He faced discrimination. He hated his boss. He was turned down for unemployment. He blamed the company. He blamed the army. He should have been stopped.

Today, as America reels from the second mass shooting in as many days, the blogosphere and the traditional media are lighting up with commentary on why the shooters in the Fort Hood and Orlando killings did what they did. If you google the stories, you find headline after headline with various speculation about motive, interspersed with the occasional article referring to the motives in each shooting as a "mystery."

Human beings don't like uncertainty, as I discussed yesterday. And the media doesn't like to report anything nuanced, and certainly not "we don't know." Where's the human interest in that? So we look for answers, and sometimes the answers we come up with sound good . . . until you think about them.

The shooter at Fort Hood is a psychiatrist. He had treated many people who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Now there is speculation that this experience caused him to be traumatized himself, and in turn caused yesterday's shootings. No sooner had that theory hit the airwaves then we had articles arguing the opposite -- that PTSD is not contagious, and we are just making excuses.

The truth is, PTSD is indeed contagious, in a documented phenomenon called "compassion fatigue" or sometimes secondary or vicarious traumatization. People who work with the traumatized are susceptible to symptoms of trauma themselves -- this is a documented phenomenon and there are documented ways to try to prevent it. But as much as compassion fatigue is a real thing, most people who have it don't shoot people. Saying that is the cause is much too simplistic.

The shooter is also Muslim, true. And yet, most people who are Muslim don't shoot people either. And if mass shootings are caused by being Muslim, how do we account for the Orlando shooter, who certainly wasn't, or the perpetrator in the Pittsburgh gym shootings, or at Virginia Tech, or Columbine? Why is the Fort Hood shooting "terrorism" and those are horrible violent crime?

In Orlando, the shooter almost certainly was a disgruntled former employee with money problems. This is all true. But how many thousands of people fit that description, and never hurt a fly? How many hurt themselves but not others? How do you know who is who and which is which. Unfortunately, you don't.

There is a lot of commentary today suggesting that we as a country are hesitant to admit the "truth" about Fort Hood, and I think they are right. But that truth isn't that the shooter was a Muslim terrorist. That truth is that we just don't know. We may someday, or we may not. And if we don't know, we can't know it won't happen again, and that scares us.

We want to think that if we exclude certain ethnicities or nationalities or religions from our lives, we will prevent the next shooting from happening to us. We want to believe that if we know the Fort Hood shooter was a terrorist, we can protect ourselves by staying away from terrorists. But in Orlando, we discovered that that isn't true either. And that scares us more, so we pretend there's no inconsistency there, no nuance. It seems we'd rather live with our bigotry in this country than with our fear of what is random.