Oil spill's psychological toll quietly mounts

[cory777]

Source: AP

NEW ORLEANS — The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster feels far worse to shrimper Ricky Robin than Katrina, even though he's still haunted by memories of riding out the hurricane on his trawler and of his father's suicide in the storm's aftermath.

The relentless spill is bringing back feelings that are far too familiar to Robin and others still dealing with the physical and emotional toll wrought by Katrina five years ago.

"I can't sleep at night. I find myself crying sometimes," said Robin, of Violet, a blue-collar community on the southeastern edge of the New Orleans suburbs, along the highway that hugs the levee on the Mississippi River's east bank nearly all the way to the Gulf.

Psychiatrists who treated people after Katrina and have held group sessions in oil spill-stricken areas say the symptoms showing up are much the same: Anger. Anxiety. Drinking. Depression. Suicidal thoughts.

Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gIXWYBTpLtSayJtg41LKXpxSxVPAD9GJT9QG0

[bemildred]

1. Quietly my ass. nt

[FrenchieCat]

2. Does Ricky Robin still support Offshore Drilling? Cause that's what I want to know!

[PearliePoo2]

3. Does he and will he

continue to vote RePug? (against his own interests)

[timefortherevolution]

5. Damn Right...They don't deserve this but, hell, how many of them

would re-elect Bush and Cheney today if given the chance!?

[Jefferson23]

4. Toll quietly mounts? Doesn't seem that way: "Oil spill stress starts to weigh on gulf residents"

snip* Bayou La Batre, Alabama, Mayor Stan Wright told the BBC that domestic violence has risen by 320 percent since the Gulf Coast oil spill began. There has been a 110 percent increase in daily calls and complaints to the local police department.

Mayor Wright says, "people are running around like chickens with their heads cut off" and "it may be years from now to determine the day that recovery begins. We're still climbing that ladder, and it's been a rough climb."

*check out the picture on the beach.

http://www.takepart.com/news/2010/06/15/domestic-violence-drastically-increased-after-the-oil-spill-


Oil spill stress starts to weigh on gulf residents
As the slick looms larger, mental health workers fear a rising tide of despair.

snip* "I look out there and I see my life ruined," Trahan, 53, said in his long Cajun drawl from the ocean-side deck at Artie's. "There ain't no shrimpin', there ain't no crabbin', there ain't no oysterin'. Well, the only thing I know is shrimpin'. That's all I know. Now you tell me: Where do I go from here? It's heartbreakin', baby."

A few blocks away, Dean Blanchard, owner of a seafood company that ships 15 million pounds a year of gulf shrimp and fish, gets up in the morning, walks to his empty warehouse, trudges back again, sits down in front of the TV and stares at CNN's oil spill coverage. Then he heads back to the warehouse.

"I'm just walking around in a circle, more or less," he said. "I don't know what to do. I never been this confused in my life."

While listless, oil-soaked pelicans may be the most memorable images of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the fishermen and business owners marooned along the Gulf Coast already are proving just as big a challenge for the mental health workers dispatched from Louisiana to Florida to help vaccinate against the fast-growing epidemic of despair.

The symptoms are well-documented: The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 touched off a wave of suicides, domestic violence, bankruptcies and alcoholism in Alaska that created an entire literature on the unique and confounding psychology of technological disaster.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/20/nation/la-na-oil-spill-mental-health-20100621