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Hurricane Katrina Exacts Another Toll: Enduring Depression
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Because of the hurricane, many have lost or changed jobs. Thousands are still living in cramped FEMA trailers and many are living in semi-deserted streets.
"If you've lost your job, you've lost your house and you've lost your friends -- well, you ought to be depressed, man, or else you're out of touch with reality," said psychiatrist Elmore Rigamer, the medical director for Catholic Charities in New Orleans, which runs five city mental health clinics.
"What we can do for these folks is to make them understand that they're not crazy," Rigamer said. "And then they can explain it to their wives and husbands."
Lyn Byrne, 58, a physical therapist, lost her Gentilly home to the flooding. Before the storm, she said recently: "I was a regular person. I had a house. I had friends, I had book clubs, I had Monday night chick flicks. I had a church."
Byrne was fine until she moved back to New Orleans more than a year after the storm to try to salvage her property.
Since then, she has lost more than 30 pounds. She often found herself crying on a whim, nervous about everything, and suddenly uninterested in socializing.
When the Tylenol PM stopped putting her to sleep, she sought out a psychiatrist and, while she had just expected to get sleeping pills, she wound up talking and crying for two hours. The psychiatrist put her on doses of Zoloft and other antidepressants -- then ratcheted up the dosages.
In telling her story, she asks: "How could I not end up anxious and depressed?"
Her troubles began with the FEMA trailer. Three times she flew down from New York, where she was staying with her mother, for an appointment with the federal contractor who was supposed to deliver the trailer to her front yard.
The contractor missed each appointment.
Finally the trailer arrived. But with only one in four of her neighbors back, her old neighborhood is a forlorn and sometimes threatening place. Her car has been stolen twice from the driveway. Once, while she was sleeping in her trailer, burglars broke in and stole her purse and other personal items.
Now before she goes to sleep at night, she hangs water jugs off the window latches and puts the trash can beside the front door in hopes of foiling the next intruder.
