Comfort Traumatised Minds in Affected Areas

Editorial:
A NOW! correspondent was aggressively berated by a Chungthang resident [an elected representative] when he arrived at this extensively damaged sub-divisional town of North Sikkim on Sunday, exactly a week since the Earthquake. The complaint was that ‘local’ media was arriving at ‘ground zero’ too late, much after the national TV camera crews had covered the town. The allegations were numerous and digressed to a wide swathe of perceived and felt slights.
The person’s aggression was however not representative of the entire community lodged in Chungthang and the situation calmed down eventually. Similar outbursts of resentment and disappointment against other agencies also flared up in the course of the day. These were directed against the State Government, senior administration and political representatives. A day earlier, an argument also broke out between a group of people and the relief and rescue workers [ITBP personnel in this case] who had been among them since Day One of the disaster. It is not important here to get into the details of the quarrel, but suffice to say that it started from a communication gap which led to a misunderstanding. At one level, these responses are natural; the trauma of the earthquake is still very visible across the town. It is impossible to block it out when the entire town resembles a refugee camp and the structures bear varying degrees of damage. With communication links severely constricted, confusion reigns and everyone is jumpy. Even in Gangtok, which sustained only minimal damage compared to Chungthang, people remain so on edge that they startle with every rattle of a shop-front shutter roll. Chungthang has been ravaged, it is understandable if their high-strung disquiet explodes ever so often.
The Medical Superintendent at STNM Hospital in Gangtok recently informed that most of the patients brought to the hospital with earthquake related injuries were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder of varying degrees as well. The Chungthang experience is in many ways a textbook representation of what happens to people in the wake of a major disaster. Immediately following a disaster, strong emotions, including feelings of disbelief, numbness, fear and confusion, take over. This leads to survival instincts, not just individual, kicking in and in the initial few days people tend to cooperate and heroic deeds are often seen. These were experience in Chungthang. People rushed to the more severely affected buildings, ignored the still unsteady blocks of rubble and battled in the dark to rescue those they could from a collapsed building. Rescue and relief workers have negotiated extremely difficult and dangerous landslides to reach stranded villages. These actions, expert explain, are best understood as “normal responses to an abnormal event.” Rescue personnel, family, and neighbors are generally the support systems that are most heavily used in such times. This has been the case at Chungthang, as it must surely be in Lachen, Lachung and Dzongu. With most of the cut-off areas now being reached, and Chungthang now better organised, the first wave has swept over and the ‘second phase’, as psychiatrists describe it, of assistance flowing in from outside agencies and the cleanup/ rebuilding process is setting in. Sikkim is a small state and this second phase almost immediately rolls into the third post-trauma experience which is marked by disappointment and resentment when expectations of aid and restoration are not met. During this period, the strong sense of community which had seen the community through the initial days may weaken as individuals focus on their personal concerns and when oversights are amplified and interpreted as intentional denials and long-term desperation occupies the mind now that immediate survival is no longer at stake. Anger, irritability, apathy and even social withdrawal are common responses at this stage.
Admittedly, such armchair analysis is easy to indulge in compared to the real task of reaching out and helping people recover. It is not, however, something which can be dismissed off-hand either. Responses from the worst affected parts of the State are already playing to the projected stereotype with suspicion and resentment replacing fear and community partnership. People are aggressively criticising everyone spared the devastation and the government and its representatives are the largest and easiest targets. This is not to say that the State has handled the situation flawlessly. Of course, the response could have been better coordinated, but the challenge now is not to contest and counter allegations coming out from the affected regions, but to scale up rehabilitation and rebuilding efforts to levels which will assuage the hurt, whether perceived or real. The State machinery should make a stronger presence in the affected areas, deploy more even more resources and personnel and involve the local populations in the decision-making and relief processes. By now, a team of counsellors should have been arranged, even flown in from centres which specialise in post-traumatic stress disorder, to attend to people housed in relief camps, labourers fleeing project sites and families still awaiting word from their loved ones stranded in the affected areas. If this has not been done yet, it should be organised immediately. It is also important to start removing unstable buildings, as much for safety as for the psychological effect that the sight of a devastated structure can have on the minds of affected people. Most importantly, the resentment of the people should be met with genuine concern and understanding, not counter arguments.