Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Another Reason to Hate Jury Duty: Post Traumatic Stress
Much of the cable news business has been obsessed, over the last few weeks, with the murder trial of the mother accused of killing Caylee Anthony. It was a very highly publicized case when it first broke, and the trial has had lots of salacious details and conspiracy theories to keep Nancy Grace and the like buys for the foreseeable future.
Branching off in a different direction, CNN.com ran a piece yesterday about the symptoms often experienced by jurors following these trials. According to the article, some jurors in murder trials,
report symptoms reminiscent of post-traumatic stress disorder, such as flashbacks and intrusive thoughts. Whether you're in the courtroom or at home watching TV, repeated exposure to the details of a horrific events can lead to a phenomenon called vicarious traumatization -- you're so connected to a tragedy that you feel emotional trauma as if you'd been directly involved.To those of us in the trauma biz, this is not a particularly surprising phenomenon. In fact, it's so accepted that people hearing about trauma can themselves be traumatized that every training or workshop you go to through the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation includes a warning about the level of distress you can expect to experience. I don't know anyone who has been to significant numbers of these things (including myself) who hasn't found themselves unexpectedly upset by a role play or case study. Jurors have it worse, because they aren't just pretending something happened -- it really did.
What should we call what is going on with these jurors? The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, Text Revision
(DSM-IV,TR) is the bible by which mental illness is diagnosed. As the article states, these jurors have some of the symptoms of PTSD -- some of them may have all of them. has two relevant diagnoses listed as "official" psychological disorders that occur following trauma. But do they have PTSD?By current standards, they can't. In order to have PTSD, the person must have
experienced, witnessed or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others.Most (but not all) diagnosticians would say that being on the jury in a grisly murder trial does not meet the threshold of being "confronted" with the event.
It just so happens, however, that the DSM is undergoing revision as we speak. The proposed guidelines for PTSD in the DSM-V define traumatic exposure as follows:
The jurors would most likely come under #4 in this definition. Their work, for the duration of their jury duty, is serving on the jury. They experience repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the murders. When the new manual comes out, they'll be eligible for a PTSD diagnosis.
The person was exposed to one or more of the following event(s): death or threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violation, in one or more of the following ways:
- Experiencing the event(s) him/herself
- Witnessing, in person, the event(s) as they occurred to others
- Learning that the event(s) occurred to a close relative or close friend; in such cases, the actual or threatened death must have been violent or accidental
- Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the event(s) (e.g., first responders collecting body parts; police officers repeatedly exposed to details of child abuse); this does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work related.
This raises two important points. First of all, it's absurd to think that what actually is going on for these people will miraculously change because a new book is published. This is somewhat like deciding that in order to be diagnosed with a cold, you now have to have a stuffy nose and a cough, whereas before you just needed the nose. Unlike a virus, bacterial infection or broken bone, there is no way to objectively define a mental illness. We classify disorders by symptoms, and every now and then we decide to reclassify. We pretend we're defining an actual thing, but really we're just describing what we see in people that have the thing.
The second, and perhaps more important point, is that most of these jurors will not have PTSD under the new definition, either. In addition to describing the symptoms and the definition of traumatic exposure, both the old and new guidelines require that the person experience
clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.This would mean that, for an extended period of time, their symptoms significantly interfere with their ability to love, work, have friends, care for children, etc. Thankfully, even those with symptoms will mostly not reach this threshold.
Just because they don't and won't have PTSD, however, doesn't mean they don't need or deserve support. One of the most helpful things courts could do is, following a grisly trial, sit the jury down and tell them they may have a rough time for a while. That way, if and when the symptoms come, people won't add thinking they're going crazy to their stress. I think it's the least we can do for those whose misfortune was simply to be civic-minded and conscientious enough to show up for jury duty, and fair enough to be chosen to hear the case.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Incident Management vs. Crisis Management vs. Crisis Response
Yesterday, guest blogger Ed Vielmetti treated us to his thoughts about last week's computer outage at United Airlines. His assessment of this incident brings up something that frequent Quarterbackers have read about in this space a lot. There seems to be a fairly widespread belief held by leaders in many corners of the corporate and public sectors that, during an emergency, when in doubt, the best thing to do is clamp down tightly on information.
For some reason, otherwise fairly smart people believe that, in the absence of information, people will generally wait patiently until instructed what to do. They also apparently believe that, if they don't have complete information to share, people will be understanding and forgiving of complete silence until such a time as they do. At best, many organizations have utterly failed to update their communication techniques to keep up with the pace of information in the age of Twitter, or even the Internet. People expect information, even partial information, right away. Gone are the days that you could announce you'd have an announcement in a couple of hours and that would appease people.
Ed's observations raise another issue, however. Companies such as United almost all have "crisis management plans" and "incident management plans." Generally speaking, when people in the business world talk about "crisis management," what they really mean is "damage control." These are the spin doctors who help you regain your reputation when you've done something really stupid. "Incident management," on the other hand, refers to what you do to stop the actual event from happening or get it under control as soon as possible. What is missing from these plans, however, which Ed illustrated so nicely, is the "crisis response plan."
In United's case, they had a plan to fix the computer system. They probably also had a plan for how to get customers back buying tickets on United when their confidence is shaken by something like this. But they didn't have a plan to minimize the amount of confidence-shaking that happened in the first place. They didn't have anything on the shelf and ready to minimize the inconvenience to their customers. They managed the incident, and they even may have managed the crisis. But they didn't respond to the crisis adequately.
This is a very tough lesson to learn, and most organizations don't learn it even after an incident like this. In fact, I saw one repost of Ed's piece yesterday that had the comment, "This is why you should back up your hard drive." And yes, you should back up your hard drive. That's an incident management issue. But what Ed was pointing out is not that United should have kept this from happening in the first place, but rather that they should have planned better for the eventuality that it, or something like it, was going to happen despite everyone's best efforts.
Most people and organizations are very resistant to planning for the worst problem that they themselves might cause. Emergencies happen, but we believe they happen to us, not because of us. Somehow, if United doesn't plan for how they're going to help customers during a computer outage, it won't happen. It would be nice if life worked that way. Unfortunately, as United discovered last week, it doesn't.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Guest Blogger: The United Computer Outage
Today, I turn the keyboard over to friend, blogger, Internet savant and frequent Quarterbacker Ed Vielmetti. I'll be back tomorrow with some thoughts about Ed's thoughts. (If you like Ed's stuff, and you should, check out his regular blog, Vacuum).
***************
On Friday night, the computer screens of United Airlines gate terminals were transformed from the windows on the teeming world of air transportation to inert, mute bricks. United's computer network had gone down, and with it the airline's ability to route airplanes, passengers, and baggage.
When an event like this happens, it's worthwhile to remember that for the most part catastrophic network failures are routine, mundane events. Any organization big enough to depend on their global network is also big enough to have senior engineering staff on call around the globe to make it work again after whatever glitch that took it out is found and fixed. The quiet dedication of network engineers to make the network work again means that there are no infrastructure heroes to congratulate for their work.
Unfortunately for the flying public, the lack of heroic measures in network rebuilding that night was accompanied by stony silence from United public relations and management, who were not able to get out ahead of the problem. With their main web site down for the count as well, United's crisis communications team did not spin up fast enough to get in front of the people through Twitter, Facebook, or whatever else they might have dreamed up in a pinch to get some kind of news out. Rather, it was up to the FAA to make the announcement, and to news organizations and bloggers and the irritated public to share details all by themselves.
Repairing global broken networks must always be the first priority in restoring service, and at some level I feel deep compassion for the United and their technicians who worked to get their system back
online. I only wish that someone on the technical team had a clear line of communications to a professional who could get in front of the public and tell people waiting in line what to do. If nothing else, this crisis professional needs to broadcast clear and unambiguous messages to United personnel - who after all don't have a network to turn to for their real work - and keep them from adding to the problem.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Dawn Fital -- A Victim Who Doesn't Fit the Profile
Last week, word filtered out through what is left of the media here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that police were looking for a woman from Pittsfield Township named Dawn Fital. Pittsfield is the township just southeast of Ann Arbor, between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Like many areas around here, the homicide rate is incredibly tiny. The Michigan State Police searchable database for 2006 (the most recent year included) shows that there were no homicides. In 2009 (the most recent year for county-wide statistics) there were 9 homicides in the entire county.
At any rate, Dawn Fital went missing on Monday from the apartment she shared with her boyfriend and ex-husband. Police in Indiana picked up her boyfriend on Tuesday after he was spotted digging a hole behind a bank, and he apparently told him he had killed his girlfriend. Her body was found on Thursday in a pond near where the boyfriend was arrested. He has been charged with open murder.
Over the four days between when this story first hit the news on Wednesday and the arraignment on Saturday, there were approximately 12 stories in our local news outlet about it. As much as I'd like to tell you that that's because we are all so stunned that anyone would be killed in our neck of the woods, and while that is not completely irrelevant, I think it is incomplete.
Dawn Fital, a White woman, was allegedly murdered in her own home by someone she lived with, a White man. She was not a criminal, a drug dealer, or a gang banger (and yes, we do have those in Washtenaw County as well). She was not African-American, and she was not male. She was not "supposed" to be a homicide victim around here.
But think about that for a moment. Because if Dawn Fital was not "supposed" to be murdered, that implies that someone else was. The fact that Fital does not meet the typical statistical profile of a homicide victim may be notable, but it should not make her death more important than that of any other person. Everyone who is murdered has a family and friends. Everyone is a human being.
The thing that strikes me -- or perhaps triggers me -- about Dawn Fital's death is that I can count on one hand the number of female homicide victims in Washtenaw County in the 9 years I have lived here. Every one of them was a victim of domestic violence. So in that sense, I guess Fital does fit the profile. The problem is the existence of the profile, and a society that in any way condones a pattern where Black men are disposable as victims of violence in general, and women are disposable as victims of violence by their partners.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Hang Onto Your Parcheesi Boards: Tornadoes Here and There
which says, "Boom, boom, boom, Mr. Brown is a wonder. Boom, boom, boom, Mr. Brown makes thunder." Parcheesi
warnings are for tornadoes. These come from something I'm relatively sure my sister made up (although she will correct me if I'm wrong). Right before Hurricane Bob was due to hit New England in the early 1990's, she said, "Hang onto your Parcheesi boards. It's gonna blow."Last weekend, we had a major family event on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, all of the out of town guests were invited for brunch, and a bunch of them stayed throughout the day. There were 14 people at my house. About midday, we learned that our area was under a tornado watch. This is not such a big deal in Southeast Michigan. It happens pretty frequently, and doesn't usually progress to a tornado warning. Even when it does, however, we don't get too upset. While tornadoes are not unheard of in this neck of the woods, the number of warnings far outstrips the number of actual tornadoes, so we have a plan and a safe room in the basement, but we try to keep things fairly calm. My husband and I discussed the fact that our usual safe room won't hold 14 people, and decided that the room next to it is almost as safe and we would use that if necessary.
A little after 5 PM on Sunday, a Parcheesi warning was issued for our county. We are on the eastern end, so we knew we had some time. I calmly invited our guests to join us in our luxurious basement, bring something to do, and carry down a chair if they preferred not to sit on the floor. At my sister-in-law's request, we brought down a guitar, and for the next hour we all sat around, noses in computers and cell phones, while my mom, my daughter and I passed the guitar around and led the group in various folk songs. A good time was had by all.
When it was over and everyone had posted about it on Facebook, I was somewhat taken aback by the comments we got from friends and family elsewhere. "Was it scary?" "That's disturbing." "How horrible." My sister-in-law praised my calmness, and said she was handling the panic, quietly, for all of us. I explained that I preferred to save my panic for when a tornado actually hits our house.
The bulk of these visiting relations are from Massachusetts, where I grew up. In the 17 years I lived there full time, I can remember no more than three tornado warnings. We would go down to the basement and wait it out, and I remember distinctly one time asking schoolmates what they had done during a warning and them saying things like, "We just hung out and hoped a tornado didn't come." They had no plan at all.
Last night, however, the central and western parts of Massachusetts were slammed by tornadoes, causing major damage in 19 or 20 towns. At least four people died. My family, living as they do in the eastern part of the state, just got a spectacular lightning show.
Meanwhile, in Missouri last week, reports indicate that a lot of people didn't take cover during the Tornado that hit Joplin until they could see the tornado bearing down on them. The sirens go off so often around there, people don't always pay attention anymore.
This is the difficulty of disaster warning systems. You want a system that people will pay attention to and that warns of any disaster that is actually going to hit. But these two goals can be at odds. Any system that catches all the tornadoes that actually hit will also catch a lot of storms that could produce tornadoes but don't. And as long as that's the case, people in areas where those storms are fairly common will not see a tornado warning as being sufficient reason to take cover. Meanwhile, people in areas where such a thing is very unusual will take it seriously, but won't have a plan because they generally don't need one. Locations like ours, in fact, are in some ways ideal. We get enough warnings that we have a plan, but not so many that we don't take it seriously.
You've heard me say many times in this space that we live our lives by
what is likely, not what is possible. We take risks all day long based on the probability that something bad will happen to us, how bad that thing would be, and how disruptive it is to our lives to not take those risks. If a tornado hits near you, it's easy to say, in hindsight, you should have taken cover. It's not as easy to say, for someone else, that taking cover every time the warning goes out is always the absolute right thing to do. It is always the safe thing to do, but "right" depends on how much of a pain it is and how likely the tornado is to actually hit where you are, so everyone will come to his or her own conclusions.
In my household, however, when the siren goes off or the warning comes onto the radio or TV, we'll continue to hold onto our Parcheesis boards. Thanks for asking.
Friday, May 13, 2011
What Exactly Do We Think an Emergency Looks Like?
Usually in this space I write about people's natural, typical reactions to stressful events. Often, these are reactions that appear, at first glance, to be overreactions. We are affected by things that we think perhaps we should not be. And of course, my "moral of the story" is almost always that the ways that we are affected actually make a lot of sense. What I'd like to share today, however, is a little difference. I encountered a stressful experience during and after which I understood my own reaction, but not that of others.
I spent a few hours this morning in a local coffee shop. I should have been doing work, but honestly at the time this occurred I was playing a game on Facebook. Sue me. At any rate, I suddenly became aware of raised voices at the counter. More specifically, a man was yelling about wanting his money from the barista. The first that I "tuned in" to what was being said, he was saying something about a card being worth $500 and the barista was saying something about it being $5. My immediate, gut impression, without hearing anything more, was that the man was mentally ill in some way. I don't know where I got that, and I couldn't see him, but there was something about the interaction.
Soon, the man's words escalated. He was swearing and saying he wanted his money, and that the barista "always slips out the back door." She was asking him, calmly, to leave. Her coworker asked him to leave. I could see him now -- a well dressed but somewhat poorly groomed man in a suit and tie, about my age.
At this point you could hear what he was yelling clearly throughout the store. I had put down my computer and was watching carefully, wondering if it was my place to call 911. I had just decided that I would if he actually threatened the barista or became physically aggressive, when he said, "If I had a knife! Not a little knife! A chef's knife! I should get a chef's knife!" I reached for my phone just as the coworker picked up hers and called 911.
The man was pleased that the police had been called. He said they would settle this. He calmed down and sat in a chair for a while. I continued to watch. And I became aware that not one other person in the store had changed what they were doing at all. The woman in the next chair over from me was still talking to a friend on her cell phone, and not about this. The men having a business meeting were continuing their meeting.
I don't get it. I understand not wanting to get involved. I understand not wanting to overreact. Maybe this encounter was more disturbing to me than it needed to be. Maybe the police didn't need to be called. Those are all judgment calls. But how could you sit in the coffee shop this morning and not think that this warranted your attention. A very quiet establishment in a relatively quiet town has a man yelling about getting a knife and refusing to leave, and you don't even look up? Really?
The only thing to which I can attribute this is people's tendency to think that danger is more obvious than it ever is. For example, your kid will probably tell you they're not supposed to talk to strangers. But if a nice woman with a puppy starts chatting them up on the playground, most kids will still talk to her. She's not a stranger, she's a woman with a puppy. Similarly, I did a training for a school yesterday in which we used a scenario regarding an out-of-place backpack. There was some debate about whether that could constitute a "suspicious package." The thing is, suspicious packages don't come labeled as such.
I don't want to invoke stereotypes, and I don't know the whole story here. But it seems to me there was a man not completely in touch with reality threatening violence, and that such a person is somewhat more likely than average to carry out violence. Yes, he's wearing a suit. Yes, the chances are still on the small side. But it might be worth pricking your ears up. Deranged gunmen don't wear t-shirts that say, "Kiss me, I'm a deranged gunman."
The police took a long time coming, and the man left in the meantime. I offered to talk to the police but they said they had the information they needed. Another day on the job. Another day for most of the patrons at the coffee shop. I'm left shaking my head.
Friday, May 6, 2011
White Powder in Letters: DC Schools Say, "Nya, nya, you can't scare us!"
Someone is sending letters to Washington, D.C. schools with white powder in them. The letters, which also contain the typewritten message, "AL AQEDA-FBI [sic]," have arrived at at least 28 schools thus far, and four more letters have been intercepted. Authorities say that the substance inside them is not hazardous, although they haven't said what it is.
If you do a Google News search for "white powder schools" you will find numerous incidents over the last decade, plus a bunch involving various organizations, institutions, and even Dancing With the Stars. Apparently, something similar even happened in Washington schools last October.
Am I the only one who remembers a time when it would have been the furthest thing from someone's mind to try to scare people with cornstarch? Before the anthrax attacks of 2001
, this just wasn't on anyone's radar screen -- not even the lunatic fringe. Since then, it seems like almost an epidemic.In 2001, schools in Western Pennsylvania (and perhaps elsewhere -- I just happened to work in Western PA at the time) had to scramble over "white powders." A local supplier of science curriculum had a 5th grade science explorations unit which many districts used which asked students to identify various "mystery powders," all of them white. All of a sudden, this didn't seem like a good idea, and replacement units had to be created or purchased.
As far as I can tell from the news coverage of the latest incident, the level of panic occurring at the schools involved is extremely low. It looks like people opened the letters and notified the authorities, who took it seriously and came out to the schools. I'm not seeing reports of school personnel becoming hysterical or evacuating buildings. I'm not seeing any reaction from kids, which seems to indicate that most of them didn't know about it. One school did notice the letter before it came inside and left it outside -- that seems cautious without being a complete overreaction.
The thing is, if we panic every time someone does this, then the bozos who are doing it get what they want. This encourages future bozos to do the same thing. Would it be safer to evacuate every building where this happens? Maybe, maybe not. We may be at the point where the chances of someone getting hurt in the evacuation -- tripping, stepping on something, getting hit by lightning, being a crime victim, getting hit by a car -- are actually greater than the chances of someone getting hurt by a mystery powder in a letter.
You might be surprised to know that the same logic often applies to bomb threats in schools. Many schools do not routinely evacuate if they receive a bomb threat. They wait for the advice of the police and fire departments regarding the specific threat. That's because if you know you can disrupt school -- any school, but particularly your own school -- by phoning in a bomb threat, then this becomes a very attractive thing for kids to do to get out of exams and such. Add to this the risk that someone will phone in a bomb threat and then wait for everyone to start coming outside and do something to them there, and evacuating is not always the thing to do. It depends on the situation.
Often times parents, in particular, don't want to hear that not evacuating is the best thing. Our knee-jerk reaction is that we should evacuate kids if there is any risk or threat. The thing is, that may not be in the best of interests of the kids. If we actually did that, we could well spend every day going in and out of school buildings. Schools have to evaluate relative risk, just as parents do at home. We don't get everyone outside when our dirty ovens start to smoke at home, or every time we hear a funny noise in the night. In loco parentis means that schools must act with the same care that parents would at home, not that they must jump every time someone says "boo." It would be a lot easier, however, if people didn't think it was a good idea to say "boo" in the first place.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Should the Bin Laden Pictures Have Been Released?
Today, the White House announced that President Obama has decided not to release photographs of Osama bin Laden's dead body. As reported in the press, there was some disagreement over whether releasing them would be a good idea. One view was that it would convince people that he is actually dead. The other was that it would "inflame" his followers, in part because it might be seen as an act of disrespect.
I actually don't have any opinion about whether either of these arguments is true. I was interested, however, that, at least publicly, a third issue was not being discussed. These pictures are described as "gruesome." What effect would seeing them have on your average person on the street?
I myself don't really need to see "gruesome" images. Just as I felt triggered by listening to audio of people screaming on 9-11, I find certain kinds of images very disturbing. Over the years, for example, I have studiously avoided the video of people jumping out of the twin towers. I don't need to see it to understand what happened, but seeing it is too vivid for me. It takes me from the reasonable point of needing to understand others' trauma to being traumatized myself.
Now, it's perfectly reasonable to say that we don't censor the press to protect Naomi Zikmund-Fisher from objectionable images. If I don't want to look, I won't -- just as is the case with the 9-11 videos. This relies, however, on media outlets handling the images in a manner that acknowledges that not everyone wants to see them, or wants their children to see them.
I vividly remember the day more than 4 years ago when I hooked up my laptop to a projector to show a website to some kids, opened my browser (which had CNN as its startup page) and was confronted by -- and confronted my students with -- a picture of the Virginia Tech shooter
aiming a firearm at the camera. I had some explaining to do to some parents, and I wished CNN
had made it just a tiny bit harder to see those pictures.This is a free society, and we don't censor our press. If my sensibilities, or even the sensibilities of a lot of people, were the sole issue, the pictures of bin Laden should have been released. The President has decided not to, and I know that a lot more went into that decision than whether they would be traumatizing to the average American. This is a good occasion to remember, however, that sensory input -- sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings -- can trigger very strong emotional reactions, much more intense than just hearing about a traumatic event. While we shouldn't prohibit them, we should be careful about exposing people to them by accident.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Bin Laden Coverage: Protecting Our Kids and the Kid Inside All of Us
Yesterday, I shared with you my thoughts about explaining Osama bin Laden to children. I was apparently not the only person worrying about this. Time
ran a piece which began, President Obama certainly wasn't taking the sensibilities of West Coast children into consideration when he made his stunner of a speech Sunday night.Parents in the Pacific time zone found themselves scrambling to explain the news in real time, and some of them were pretty unhappy about it.
While I certainly understand the problems of trying to explain this stuff to kids -- that's why I wrote yesterday's piece in the first place -- I will admit to feeling a little frustrated with those who would make this complaint. If there was one thing we all should have learned from 9-11, it is that live television is unpredictable. Anything can happen at any time. Part of being a parent is recognizing this and using it to make decisions about whether your children can watch TV, and whether you will choose to watch things live. Part of being a parent is also realizing that kids will inevitably ask about things we'd just as soon they not know about, and we have to answer the questions when they come.
In addition, speaking as someone from the east coast, Obama's speech didn't start until way past my bedtime. If he had waited until every kid in the country was asleep, he wouldn't catch a whole lot of adults, either. News happens when it happens. If you don't want your kids to see it, don't turn on the news.
That having been said, I have been somewhat appalled by what some media outlets have chosen to run in their coverage of bin Laden's death. Yesterday afternoon I was listening to "Here and Now," a public radio show from WBUR in Boston. They had the usual talking heads discussing the implications of bin Laden's death, which was all well and good. At the very end, the host said that his death also brought us "back in time" to 9-11. They then proceeded, with explanation of what each clip was, to play the audio of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center (complete with screaming), audio of someone who died in the towers on the phone, and audio of a very frightened voicemail message left by someone who died.
I cried. Then I got mad. Don't get me wrong, I certainly understand that this weekend's events bring back memories of 9-11, and to some extent they will trigger any unresolved trauma we all have. But wasn't the memory enough? Did we really need the extra boost of some vivid sensory input? Did we need to invade the privacy of dead people just one more time? Were they afraid we wouldn't remember unless they retraumatized us? And if you're worried about the sensibilities of children, would you want your kids hearing that with no warning at all?
9-11 is unique in our collective experience because it was a trauma for almost everyone in the country. That means that, in planning what to broadcast, you have to treat everyone in the audience as a trauma victim. You wouldn't force the victim of a shooting, for example, to listen to the audio of the incident without a good reason. We all deserve a little less sensationalism and a little more respect for how raw this still feels.
* The artwork on this post, like yesterday's, comes from the FEMA website and was created by a 5th grader at Chagrin Falls Intermediate School for the 1st anniversary of 9-11.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Mommy, Who's Osama Bin Laden?
I can trace my expertise talking to children about traumatic events directly to the night when my 3 year-old daughter asked, as I was tucking her into bed, "Why is everyone singing the 'Bless America' song?" It was September 14, 2001. We had been at a previously scheduled party, and at 7 o'clock we spilled out in front of the house, lit candles, and sang.
This was the first of many questions my daughter would have about 9-11, then and many times in the years that followed. We tried our best to answer them in an age-appropriate way. We wanted to give her answers that were honest and respected the question, but not overwhelm her with frightening information. I like to think we did a decent job.
This morning, when my husband told our daughter that Osama bin Laden had been killed, she reacted with disbelief. "No way. Osama bin Laden, gone?" To her, the bogey-man had been vanquished. Then her brother piped up. "Who's Osama bin Laden?" My husband responded, "It's hard to explain."
My son will be 6 this week. As much as bin Laden was the bogey-man of my daughter's early childhood, he was completely irrelevant to my son. That by itself is amazing.
In our house, "It's hard to explain" really means, "Go ask Mommy, she's good at this sort of thing." So it fell to me. I wanted to give an honest answer to an honest question. But I knew the answer would be potentially scary, and so I wanted to make sure the answer removed any danger as much as possible from my son's experience.
Here's what I said:
- A long time ago, when your sister was little -- she was 3 -- some very mean people attacked our country. The man in charge of the mean people was named Osama bin Laden. We wanted to catch him and arrest him for what his people had done, but we couldn't find him. We looked for him for almost 10 years. Then, yesterday, our soldiers found him in the country of Pakistan. They tried to arrest him, but he didn't want to go. He shot a gun at the soldiers, and they shot guns back, and he died.
I'm sure my son is not the only little kid asking this question today. I'm sure my husband is not the only parent at something of a loss for how to explain the situation. If my explanation can help you talk to your own kids, please feel free to borrow. I've also heard very good things about the books The Day America Cried
and The Little Chapel That Stood
for discussing 9-11 with little ones. We owe our children honest answers to honest questions. If we don't give them that now, who will they be able to turn to when the next bogey-man comes along?
* The artwork on this post was created by a 5th grader at Chagrin Falls Intermediate School in Chagrin, OH for the 1st anniversary of 9-11, and comes from the FEMA website.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Life and Death in Tornado Alley
I remember when I was an undergraduate, I was working on a computer project in an evening class during a wind storm. All of a sudden, the TA started yelling "Save, save! Everybody save!" About two minutes later, the lights went out. From the main computer lab across the courtyard, we could hear people screaming -- they hadn't saved. The TA was from Oklahoma. He said, "I just knew."
There are places in this country where tornadoes are a fact of life. Oklahoma is one of them, as are many places in the south. Last night, those facts hit hard. A string of storms ravaged the southern U.S., killing at least 214 people including 131 in Alabama alone.
Remember, these are places that are prepared for tornadoes
. They know they get tornadoes -- perhaps not as many as last night in a typical night, but some. They practice for tornadoes. They have a plan. And 214 people still died. This brings up a difficult issue for me, and perhaps for you as well. Preparedness
for likely threats is important, and some of us like to think we're pretty good at it. My family has a tornado plan and an automatic weather radio. We know where to go and what to do when a storm is coming, and we have done it several times. Luckily, the storms have never hit us directly. What we don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about is the simple truth that if a tornado actually hit our house dead on, there's no guarantee that we'd survive it. We have a better chance in our little basement room, certainly. But if a twister flattens the house, we pretty much have to hope that the first floor doesn't fall on us in the basement. Our safe room is useful for a storm that goes nearby, breaks the windows, picks up the cars and throws them, and generally wreaks havoc, as long as it doesn't actually hit our house.
Most of the time, however, we choose to ignore that fact. This is largely because we can't do anything about it. We know where the safest place to be during a tornado is, and we make sure our kids know it too. But "safest" and "safe" isn't the same thing. Sometimes, your TA doesn't have time to yell "save!" or they do but you don't have time to hit the right keys.
They're cleaning up across the south today. A lot of people are digging through a lot of rubble. And a lot of folks are facing up to what they already knew in the back of their minds -- you won't know if you're safe from the next storm until it comes.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Anniversaries: Bombs in Littleton, Colorado
Wednesday was the 12th anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colorado. For those of you much younger than I or living under a rock, on April 20, 1999 two students went through the school shooting, killing 12 students, one teacher and, eventually themselves. The original plot was for propane bombs to explode outside the cafeteria, sending people running directly into the line of fire. The bombs failed to go off.
On Wednesday, April 20 this year, a fire broke out near the food court of a mall in Littleton, Colorado. When it was extinguished, firefighters found two explosive devices nearby. They had not, thankfully, detonated. The mall was evacuated and the schools placed on lockdown.
Anniversaries of traumatic events are tricky things. From a distance, there is no particular reason that the anniversary of an event is any better or worse or more or less related to the event than any other day. But we don't live at a distance. Our culture tells us that one rotation of the earth around the sun is an important length of time, and each successive rotation is also important. If we had no concept of a calendar, we might not care that this week's incident coincided with the anniversary of the massacre at Columbine. Most of the time we're glad we have that concept. This week, perhaps not so much.
I first learned about the mall incident on Thursday morning from a friend's Facebook post. She noted that she has family who love to shop near there, and another friend commented that she has family there too. This is the sort of personal connection we all tend to make at moments like this. The thing is, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. On Wednesday two bombs did not go off at a mall near where bombs were placed and shootings occurred 12 years ago. Why, on Thursday, do I care that I have family that was in the area but not at that mall on Wednesday?
We notice these connections, as distant as they may seem, because of a very natural and automatic response we have to danger. When a threat is detected -- whether because we see or hear it ourselves or we simply hear about it -- our automatic response is to ask whether it affects in any way. I imagine us sending little office workers into the files in our mind to find out if we have anything filed where the danger is. If the threat is near us -- say an oncoming car -- those little people come back pretty fast with "yes!!" and we try to get out of the way. Most of the time, they come back with "no."
Once in a while, however, they come back with the news that we have stuff in a related file but it's not clear how important the relationship was. They looked under "Littleton, Colorado
" and found the "Columbine" file. For my friends, they found the "shopping" and "family" files. Even though the answer to whether the threat affects us is still "no," it takes us a little longer to decide that. Even though we know we and everyone we love are OK, we are left with that nagging feeling that "no" isn't the whole answer. And so we post on Facebook and say, "This could have affected someone I care about but it didn't." The interesting thing about such loose and tangential connections is that, when we post them, our friends all know how we feel. We've all been there, and the little office workers are just doing their job.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
What Fukushima Dai-Ichi Doesn't Teach Us About Nuclear Power
The ongoing crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant in Japan has a lot of people reexamining nuclear power as a generation method. In Europe in particular, people are taking a very close look at whether continuing or expanding nuclear power generation is a good idea. If what is happening in Japan is what one can expect from nuclear power, the argument goes, we need to find some alternate sources of energy.
So let's take a look. As it turns out, if you compare the various ways you can generate power and the fatalities associated with that method -- including those due to workplace accidents, but also including those due to environmental damage (like a nuclear accident) -- the range is vast. In fact, the most lethal method of power generation has more than 4,000 times as many deaths attributed to it per terawatt hour generated as the least lethal one, and about 4.5 times as many as the second most lethal method.
It would make quite a bit of sense, given the statistics, for countries to take a good, long, hard look at this deadly form of power, and start now to take steps to eliminate it. In fact, looking at the numbers, you might expect that there would be a major initiative to shift from the most lethal to the least lethal form of power generation, which would be in everybody's best interests.
As it turns out, that's exactly what had been happening before the Japanese earthquake. You see, the most lethal way to generate electricity, as it turns out, is from coal, which accounts for about 50% of the world's electricity generation right now and causes 161 deaths per terawatt hour generated. In addition to the deaths attributable to pollution and global warming, coal generation requires coal mining, one of the most dangerous occupations in the world.
So, before the earthquake, many countries were looking at switching more generation over to a much less deadly form of power generation. As it turns out, the lowest fatality rate per terawatt hour in the world is nuclear power, with just 0.04 deaths per terawatt hour, even taking into account the Chernobyl disaster and other smaller incidents. Even wind energy has more than 4 times this death rate -- caused by turbine blades flying off and workers falling from turbines.
So why are we so upset about nuclear power right now? Why can we muster opposition to even continuing to use the plants we have, let alone building new ones, but nowhere near the push to switch from coal to something -- anything -- else?
First of all, deaths related to coal generation are often invisible. When people die early because of respiratory problems, it doesn't make the news as being "coal-related." These deaths are spread out around the world, and the connection to electricity generation is not terribly obvious. Even when miners die in a mine collapse and it does get a lot of attention, this is generally seen as relating to mine safety, not to power generation. It's much easier to blame mine owners than it is to blame ourselves for using so much power in the first place or tolerating coal-burning plants.
With nuclear power, on the other hand, accidents are big news. This is in part because they really are very rare, but also because the environmental damage is much greater for a small pollution incident. Think about it. If we paid the kind of attention to a tiny seepage of coal smog that we are to the problems at Fukushima, we'd do nothing but talk about coal plants all day long. Unlike coal, which releases a continuous stream of pollutants into the air all the time, the release of nuclear material is much more unusual and much more deadly.
And that's the problem. We don't tend to react to overall averages when we think about deaths and risks. We react to what's going on right now. If every nuclear power plant released radiation the way the Fukushima plant is doing now, and they did it day in and day out, 365 days a year, it would really be catastrophic. The thing we're missing when we say that because of this accident nuclear is too dangerous is that, in fact, every nuclear plant doesn't do that, and even at worst they won't.
Does that mean there's nothing to learn here? Of course not. The safer nuclear plants can be made, the better. Same goes for reducing pollution from coal and making mines safer. And if we can figure out a way to generate power that never kills anyone, I'm all for it. But if we're going to make energy policy, maybe we should consider making it based on the complete facts, and not just what we're scared of today.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Soldiers are People Too
Yesterday morning, an F-15 Eagle Fighter
crashed in rebel-held territory in Libya. The crew safely ejected and was rescued. Yesterday morning, NPR had some snippets from an Egyptian doctor who happened to be staying in the hotel where one of the crew members was brought. She was asked to treat him, but he pretty much only had bumps and bruises. The doctor commented that although the pilot was basically unhurt, he needed someone to sit with him because he was anxious and unsettled.Our servicemen and women go through a lot of training, and they're very good at what they do. Pilots are trained on how to eject during a crash, and this crew clearly utilized that training. Anyone who flies in the military has considered the possibility that they're going to either be shot down or crash for some other reason. This isn't completely unforseen.
It pays to remember, however, that training for what to do and considering it ahead of time is very different than actually doing it. Servicepeople train so they can do the job, and so panic will not be added to the emotional stress of the situation. But you can't prevent people from feeling stress at all. The training these pilots had was like an emotional bullet proof vest
-- it prevented this crash from completely overwhelming them. But people who get shot while wearing Kevlar will tell you that it still hurts, and can knock you down. It's not unreasonable for them to need a little help getting back up.We tend to look at situations like this and think, "Well, that's their job," and, of course, it is. But even if it's your job to be in danger, there are times that are just plain scary, regardless. You might be prepared for them. You might handle them just right. But you're going to feel it when you're done. This might be a good time to remember that the men and women who serve in the military are still, first and foremost, people.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Is Kyron's Law a Good Idea?
Last June, 7-year-old Kyron Horman disappeared from his elementary school without a trace. All eyes have been focused for quite some time on his stepmother
in connection with his disappearance, but no arrests have been made and she remains a free woman and, for all I know, an innocent one. Now there is a push to put surveillance cameras in all elementary schools in Oregon, under a proposed law dubbed "Kyron's Law." Kyron's own school got cameras shortly after he disappeared, funded by a private citizen.As a school administrator, there have been many times I wished I had video footage of an incident. The "he hit me first" thing gets very old, very fast. As more and more kids have cell phones, there have even been a couple of times when kids recorded an incident themselves, although more often than not the person recording was doing so to post it on YouTube, not to aid in the investigation.
One might argue that, had their been cameras in Kyron's school the day he disappeared, he might have been found by now. But I think that those who advocate for putting in surveillance cameras
would go a step further, arguing that either he wouldn't have disappeared or that he definitely would have been found right away. That is, most likely, not true.Surveillance cameras in schools give people, and particularly parents, a false sense of security. Because they might prevent some problems, we think they prevent all problems. But surveillance cameras are problematic themselves.
First of all, no matter how many cameras you install, there will most likely be someplace the cameras aren't. This is how most of us want it, because as much as we want to protect our kids, we don't want someone filming them in the bathroom or the locker room. This raises a larger issue, which is that there is a need to balance privacy with safety, and parents tend to be a stickler for both.
Second, if there are cameras and someone wants to snatch a kid or otherwise harm him, that person will go where the cameras aren't. That means that while the hallways and classrooms and buses may be safer, the bathrooms and locker rooms are more dangerous. In the case of Kyron Horman, if indeed his stepmother is responsible, she simply would not have used the school as her "alibi."
Third, and this is the toughest one for parents to wrap their heads around, we can't watch our kids 24/7. We do our best to keep them safe, and at some point we have done all we can. At night, when my kids are asleep in their rooms, I assume they are asleep in their rooms. I don't have a camera there, I don't sleep on the floor, and I don't check on them all that often. Could they disappear? Yes. Is that likely? No.
The fact of the matter is that Kyron's disappearance made the news because it was so rare. Kids do not disappear from school in the middle of the day. They disappear, if they disappear, from the neighborhood or the bus stop or walking to or from school, or even from their homes. But they don't go missing from their schools because that is actually a pretty hard place to snatch a kid. And putting in cameras may make it even harder, but is that really where you want that money to go? You can almost certainly do more to protect children by putting another layer of wood chips
on the playground of every school, or posting another adult on their walking route. And that doesn't even take into consideration what educational use that money could be put to.Once again, we, as parents, have to face up to the fact that dropping off our children at school is an act of faith. We also have to face the fact that parents are really not any better at protecting children than schools are. If Kyron's stepmother harmed him, the greatest risk he faced was not going to a school with no cameras, it was living with a family with her in it. And while cameras might have brought her to justice, they wouldn't have changed that risk factor one bit.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Is There Going to Be a War?
When I was just shy of 12 years old, the British and Argentina got into a spat over the Falkland Islands
. If you are a) British or b) Argentinian, this was probably a very big deal. For the rest of the world, not as much, to the point where, if you were not alive then you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. And while I don't remember much about the particulars, I do remember, as the tensions rose, a very serious conversation I had with my father.We were walking through a museum -- I remember that distinctly -- and I told my father I was scared. I had heard on the news that there was this argument between these two countries, and the newscaster had said they were on the brink of war. From my point of view, there had never been a war in my lifetime, and I was really afraid.
Looking back, I suspect my father didn't know where to start. It's not that he couldn't explain the tension between Argentina and the UK. It's probably not even that he couldn't give some good predictions about what would happen between the two countries. The problem is that, in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as in the first half of the twenty-first, there is no good definition of what is and is not a war.
I bring this up, because the United States, along with several allies, has started air strikes in Libya. And even now, at the age of 40, I have a visceral reaction of, "Oh, no, I hope this doesn't become a war," followed by, "Wait, maybe it already is." In fact, last week my own 12-year-old asked me if the fight between Gaddafi's forces and the protester/rebel/opposition fighters was "at the point of becoming a war." I had no answer.
Technically speaking, the U.S. has not been at war since World War II. That was the last time the United States Congress exercised its constitutional power to declare war. Congress has authorized the use of military force since then, the President has ordered the use of force without Congressional authorization, and the U.S. has participated in military action authorized by the United Nations. In my lifetime, our troops and/or planes have fought in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan Somalia and Libya, and that's just right off the top of my head. But we have not been at war. At the Veterans Administration Hospital where I'm currently doing an internship, we talk about OEF/OIF vets, referring to Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, but not to the Iraq or Afghanistan wars.
While historians and legal scholars probably have a lot to say on the difference between declaring war and just fighting under some other authority, to a kid this is a distinction without a difference. To most young people, Vietnam looks just as war-like as World War I. Wars have an almost mythological status for kids, and probably for some adults, in which a switch is thrown and what was "fighting" becomes "The War" and everything is much, much worse.
So when a child asks whether there is going to be a war, what they are really asking is whether the conflict is going to affect their lives. Will their parents be called up. Will there be rationing. Will there be attacks on U.S. soil. Will people they know be killed. For children whose parents are in the service, the answer to "will there be a war" with Libya may well be yes. To most other kids in the United States, the answer is most likely no.
There was, in case you've forgotten, a war in the Falkland Islands in 1982. If I hadn't listened to the news, I would never have known anything about it. There was a war, but there wasn't a war the way I understood the term. In fact, I think 1982 may well have been the last time I actually had a working definition for what a war is.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The Japanese Crisis: Assessing the Need Stateside
The attention of most of the country continues to be across the Pacific in Japan. The loss of life is horrific. The material damage is enormous. The fear regarding the radiation in Fukushima is mounting.
Now is not the time for a psychological crisis intervention in Japan. The situation is still unfolding, and there are still significant basic physical and safety needs to be met. The best that can be done from a mental health standpoint in Japan right now is managing people's fear. Both the Prime Minister and the Emperor appear, from this vantage point, to be doing a pretty good job at exercising resilient leadership. The consistent emphasis on coming together and getting through this is good practice.
What about folks in the U.S.? Is there anything we can or should be doing for people here? I think there is.
First of all, everyone in the world needs some decent information about the radiation risk
. With the exception of nuclear scientists, most of us have very little understanding of how much radiation is too much, how the current accident will affect people in Japan and whether it will affect anyone anywhere else at all. The news media is doing a somewhat better job of bringing in experts to explain this to us, but I think it would help if they acknowledged that none of us like hearing that there's any radiation at all, and that the biggest impact here is from fear, not nuclear byproducts.People here who have family and close friends in Japan, particularly in the area where the quake and tsunami were, need something a little more. I think you could further separate that group into two -- those who come from Japan and have roots there, and those who don't trace their roots to Japan but have family studying or visiting there. Last Friday was ghastly for both of these groups, and it would not be surprising if they're feeling the affects even now, presuming that they now know how their loved ones fared in the quake.
For those who come from Japan, this incident is not, in some ways, over. The pictures the rest of us see and think are horrible are more personal. They may have lost homes or other special places. They may not be ready, yet, to process through their feelings and try to put them away.
For those who had family visiting or living in Japan but are not themselves Japanese, the incident is largely over and they are probably ready for some intervention. It would be totally understandable if they are having some issues with feeling irritable, having trouble concentrating, not sleeping well or having intrusive thoughts about the quake and the agonizing wait to hear from loved ones. They need to know they're normal -- it's the situation that isn't.
Then there is that group that is somewhere in a no man's land in between. They are from Japan, every picture is personal, the situation is ongoing, and they also experienced the traumatic death of someone they love. For them, some understanding and moral support is in order until the dust can settle a little more and they can start to come to terms with all of this.
I wrote yesterday about my son's friend, Taro. When I wrote, I wasn't sure which category Taro fell into. Late yesterday we confirmed that he is in this last category. He lost his grandmother and his home. The only bright side, perhaps, is that young children don't really understand death and loss as permanent things. But his family does, like so many other families in Japan, here and elsewhere. The latest estimate I've heard is 10,000 dead. That's a lot of people in limbo, waiting for this to be over so they can grieve.
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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
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