JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Residents of five Southern states are figuring out what life looks like after recent devastating hurricanes, Helene and Milton. Between those two storms, hundreds of people died, and the physical destruction by now is well-known - homes underwater or swept away, and roads and bridges and businesses were wiped out. And for survivors, there is also a significant psychological toll. For more on that, we called up Dr. Sandro Galea. Dr. Galea is the dean of Boston University School of Public Health, and he's researched how Atlantic hurricanes like Harvey in 2017 can traumatize residents who have been hardest hit. Dr. Galea, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
SANDRO GALEA: Thank you for having me.
SUMMERS: Dr. Galea, many of us - we anticipate the physical destruction, right? - the loss of property, perhaps even the loss of life. But I think many of us - perhaps we don't think about the mental health effects. What is it about surviving a major hurricane that makes it so taxing on a person's mental health?
GALEA: Yeah, and the physical harms that you talked about are not separate from the mental health harms. In fact, people who have had physical injury are much more likely to have mental illness or poor mental health after these events. There are a number of things that these events result in. They result in loss of property. They result in disruption of daily routines. They result in, for example, closure of schools, difficulty with work, difficulty with caring after elderly relatives.
And all of these stressors, we know, accumulate, and they result in overwhelming of some people's mental health, resulting in symptoms that we call depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress. And these manifestations themselves then can be quite disabling for weeks and months and sometimes years.
SUMMERS: From your research, are there groups that are especially vulnerable, psychologically, in the wake of a severe hurricane?
GALEA: Yeah, for all of us, our mental health represents a balance between the assets that we have that protect us, meaning financial assets, social assets, physical assets. So when these kind of events hit, it is people with fewer assets who are at greater risk - so people who are socially isolated; people who have less money, lower income, or are unemployed or are disabled; people who do not have homes or are renting or are living in - many people in the same small space. Those groups are the groups who are more disadvantaged before the hurricane. And when these large-scale events hit, it is those groups that do worse.
SUMMERS: When we talk about relief, what sorts of resources are most impactful in terms of helping people who are really struggling mentally in the aftermath of storms like Milton and Helene?
GALEA: The most important resource in the short and medium term is restoring people's lives, meaning restoring people's homes, making sure people can go back to where they were living, making sure that people's jobs are intact, making sure that children go back to school, elderly care is taken care of. That's the most important thing that we can do. But separate and apart from that, people who have symptoms of poor mental health - people have symptoms of depression, which means, for example, anxiety, being worried, not being able to sleep, not being able to eat - having resources for those people becomes important. And in large part, what we have been trying to do in our research and others have been trying to do is to make sure that there is awareness that these symptoms after these events are symptoms of mental illness that can be helped by a provider.
SUMMERS: The Atlantic hurricane season is not over yet, so I do want to ask - do you have advice for people who may, unfortunately, find themselves in the path of another hurricane? I mean, just like people board up the windows of their homes in preparation, is there anything that people can do, psychologically, just to shore themselves up?
GALEA: Yeah, I think a combination of things. No. 1 is knowing that mental health injury is very real and being aware that that is one of the consequences so that one can actually discuss it, seek help with their health provider. I think that's a first step.
The second step is trying to shore oneself up with the protection around us that we can, and this goes back to the assets point I was making - making sure that one is tightly connected to a network of friends who can look after one if something happens, make sure you have a place to go to if something happens. Protecting one's home physically is an important part of it, but also making sure that one's employer is aware that you may have to evacuate so that you still have a job that you're going back to - so creating a system around us that continues to protect us and look after us even when an event like this happens.
SUMMERS: That's Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of Boston University School of Public Health. Thank you so much for joining us.
GALEA: Thank you.
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