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Hurricane Katrina Exacts Another Toll: Enduring Depression
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"Do you think I'm having mental issues yet? Wait -- it gets better," she said.
Her biggest problem is trying to finance her house repairs and escape the trailer: Like thousands of others in Louisiana, Byrne did not have enough insurance.
She has received $40,000 from her flood and homeowner's insurance policies, but a contractor told her the repairs would cost $133,000.
The state's "Road Home" program is supposed to provide financial aid for people in her situation. Yet, although she was one of the first to apply, she still has not received a check.
Two years after the flooding, Byrne has no idea when she will ever get out of the trailer or stop driving around with laundry in the car in search of an open laundromat, and whether her friends and church, St. Raphael's Catholic, will return.
"People say, 'Oh, we're coming back -- look at the French Quarter or Magazine Street.' But I don't live there. Where I live, there's no church and no laundromat and no people. It's just so tragic, and it keeps getting sadder and sadder."
According to the Harvard survey, many people in New Orleans feel the same way.
Between March 2006 -- six months after the storm -- and summer 2007, the number of people reporting signs of serious mental illness rose from 11 percent to 14 percent. Before the storm it had been about 6 percent.
Similarly, the number of people who reported thoughts of suicide rose from 3 to 8 percent in New Orleans.
"There's more depression, more financial problems, more marital conflict, more thoughts of suicide," said Daphne Glindmeyer, a New Orleans psychiatrist who is president of the Louisiana Psychiatric Medicine Association. "And a lot of it is in people who never had any trouble before."
Interviews with psychiatrists turn up story after story of people with no history of depression plunged into mental anguish deep enough to require treatment.
A teenager living in a trailer turns homicidal. A woman whose mother died in the car during an evacuation -- and then could not be taken to funeral home -- suffers post-traumatic stress disorder. A firefighter involved in dozens of rescues seethes with anger at the region's inability to come back.
"These people don't necessarily need a good psychiatrist," Rigamer said. "They need a good contractor or someone to fix the 'Road Home' program and good leadership."
News assistant Jill F. Bartscht contributed to this report.
