Disaster Experience

Negative Outcomes and Perceptions

Survivors experience disaster in different ways. They may suffer physical injury, bereavement, material loss, temporary or permanent displacement, unemployment, psychological impairment, or some combination of these ills. Witnesses and emergency responders are just as likely as victims to vividly remember the experience.

Nevertheless, few people are plunged into mental illness or psychological instability as a result of disaster. The most common effects on the human psyche are post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression. All of these are obstacles can be overcome with proper diagnoses and treatment by professionals with appropriate expertise. Post-traumatic stress disorder can be identified through a wide range of physical (somatic), emotional, intellectual, and behavioral symptoms, which are often experienced in combination, and that render the subject's life and social relations difficult. Feelings of inadequacy may be linked to a tendency to relive the disaster, perhaps with vivid flashbacks, in [Page 111]which critical moments are graphically remembered. It is also common to experience a sense of inadequacy accompanied by feelings of anguish or depression. Treatment involves individual or group therapy that encourages the person to come to terms with the past and move on to a future in which the memory of events assumes manageable proportions.

When a person experiences a disaster their perceptions of risk can be radically altered. First, disaster achieves a new salience in the order of priority. What previously seemed remote and improbable is now an established fact, replete with details that render it palpable and believable. Second, living through a disaster can induce people to seek more information about risks and impacts. Third, observations and experiences will be incorporated into people's general views of the world and attitudes to it.

One significant example is the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755, which killed approximately 60,000 people and devastated the capital of a great trading empire. This event directed European intellectualism away from the optimism of the Enlightenment into an altogether more pessimistic view of humanity's time on Earth. Remarkably similar effects occurred after the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, as the aftermath was also colored by apocalyptic strains of millennialism.

At the individual level, the ability to interpret disaster rationally and adequately increases with age and educational level. The combination of experience (whether or not it is acquired by direct involvement) and learning enable people to work out survival strategies and means of coming to terms with threats. Conversely, in areas where hazard levels are high and vulnerability is endemic, knowledge can lead to heightened states of anxiety—for example, among the inhabitants of Norwegian fjords during the snow avalanche season.

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