For Virginia Tech Survivors, Memories Will Be Powerful

Marjorie Lindholm, 24, had just returned from getting her mom's car fixed in Littleton, Colo., when she heard the news: Twenty-two students had died, maybe more, shot by another student at a college in Virginia. Immediately, she was swept back to Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, reliving the moments, minute by breathless minute, when two students went on a shooting rampage, killing 12 of her classmates and a teacher before committing suicide.

"I started crying, then shaking," she said in a telephone interview last week. "I remembered everything I saw at Columbine. I got physically ill.

"There is no way I'm going to forget that day."

To remember is a good thing, scientists are beginning to realize. No one would want Lindholm, or the survivors of the Virginia Tech massacre, to relive such horror forever. But remember it when necessary? Absolutely. Such memories are like notes you've taken that, while important, aren't necessary at the moment and in fact, are cluttering up your desk. You file them away -- carefully -- so you can pull them out when you need them. With memories as part of their pasts, trauma victims can be better prepared the next time they encounter a perilous situation.

Scientists used to think that the brain's anatomy and function were fixed by adulthood. New studies, aided by technology, show that events, good and bad, change brain structure and function throughout life, according to Norman Doidge, a research psychiatrist at the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center and the University of Toronto.

Some survivors of a horrible event work through trauma on their own, turning it into a memory that can be drawn upon when it is needed. Others, however, need professional help. "The goal of therapy is not to obliterate any record of of the event," says Doidge, author of "The Brain That Changes Itself," a new book describing the plasticity of the brain that draws on research and clinical work. Forgetting the event "would leave the mind impoverished, with an airbrushed view of reality. What you want to do is make sure the event is experienced as part of a memory system that can be evoked when it's relevant." So that you can reach into the filing cabinet when you discover you need a particular document.

Struggling to Recover

At the moment of catastrophe, the brains of those who witness the event firsthand may lose the ability to organize and synthesize the information just received. Traumatized survivors often say something like, "It's as if time slowed down. All I heard was the crack of a gun, but I didn't connect it to what was happening."

Recovery after that can be a long and erratic process. Some individuals may experience anxiety, depression or both. Others may show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), right away or years later. As their brains attempt to reorganize information, they may avoid talking about the event. They don't want to go anywhere near where it occurred or see friends who remind them of it. They may go into what psychologist Melissa Brymer, a specialist in child trauma, calls "the constant lookout" characterized by nervousness, irritability and anger.

They also may recall the event over and over. Doidge calls this "living in the eternal presence of the trauma," and it's a real problem. The brain, under stress during the actual incident, secretes a hormone that kills cells in the hippocampus, which converts short-term memory to long-term. Every time the tragedy is relived, more cells are killed, further eroding the chance that the catastrophe can be relegated to the brain's equivalent of the filing cabinet.

Rapid Reaction

Lindholm knows about these reactions. She was a 15-year-old cheerleader when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold stormed through Columbine. She lay for four hours that day on a cold floor in her biology classroom, next to classmates and business teacher Dave Sanders, who had stumbled into the room bleeding. Sanders eventually died of gunshot wounds despite students' efforts to save him.

Lindholm returned to high school in August after the shooting, then dropped out. She took classes at a community college, then dropped them. She had always wanted to be a doctor but was required to take biology to get into a pre-med program. Every time she tried to sit still in biology, she would have to leave the room.

Eventually she completed enough science to enroll at the University of Colorado at Denver, where she is now. She wrote a book called "A Columbine Survivor's Story" and started speaking about her experience to high school assemblies via webcam.