"Trauma and Parity "
By Lorre Leon Mendelson
December 19, 2001

ictims at Risk Again" grabbed my attention from morning coffee. The Washington Post referred to a "spike in depression, substance abuse, divorces, and suicides" since the September 11 bombing. How incredibly tragic, how utterly devastating and how very predictable. Why predictable? Because this is how trauma works. For those of us who live with trauma, depression, illness, terror, fear, abuse through disasters of nature, war, or innocence: those who survive violence of all types: professionally, as family members or friends, or as a first-hand survivor, we become bonded by the emotional emptiness, hopelessness and isolation of trauma. We feel the overwhelming, crashing silence of loss and aloneness.

I watched family members and uniformed civil servants join the rockers fund-raising in NY as they sang to benefit survivors, who stood in shock. I wondered where they would be emotionally in a couple of months. One who stands out most in my mind is the young boy whose firefighter father died in his heroic attempts to save others and all he needed to say was "my father was a firefighter. He died Sept. 11." I wonder if that boy will be able to access services to help him, so he does not become a statistic of suffering.

But it is questionable if this young man or many of the hundreds, even thousands of others will get the help they need. Yesterday a move to put mental health coverage on the same level as "physical illness" failed in Congress. Who will be hurt by this? ALL Americans.

As humans, we need reasons explaining why or how events happen. It is understandable that someone who experiences war, trauma, family death, loss of safety and security, would experience traumatic illnesses, anxiety, depression, substance abuse. It is equally as difficult to accept conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depressive illnesses and personality disorders as illnesses when we cannot attribute them to an event or cause.

Insurance and business concerns about affordability and business costs dominated the plank rather than the health and welfare of those living with mental and emotional trauma. Have we not yet learned the price we pay as individuals and as Americans ignoring financial costs of withholding treatment for illness, criminalizing psychiatric conditions, blaming illness on people?

We learn together: this is not an easy road nor is it one any of us needs to walk alone. We MUST throw off stigma and discrimination of mental health, counseling, medicines, the need for community support services. Together we are America.

Lorre Leon Mendelson is a mental health advocate and activist.
Lorreleon@aol.com is her email address.