Fifth anniversary of Katrina reveals mental health hurts from wrongadvice to victims

NATCHITOCHES, LOUISIANA - Carol Forsloff - My
neighbor stood sadly at my door.  "The city is flooded," she said;
and we both knew where that was, as we had worried about it for days.  I
put on my shoes, left the house and went down to the Red Cross to help.

The

victims from Hurricane Katrina's fury came by the hundreds through
Natchitoches, Louisiana, just as Governor Kathleen Blanco had directed
at the time.  They had started out early, heeding the advice to go
north.

I saw them, when I arrived at Northwestern University in
Natchitoches, sitting on blankets and mattresses strewn on the floor in a
section of a large building on campus that had been set up as a
shelter.  A single television screen held the attention of the crowd in
stretches, before some turned away, unable to manage the pain alone.

I
was there to assuage some of that pain.  As a licensed mental health
counselor at the time, I was the only one in Natchitoches available to
help the week of the flooding of New Orleans.  I stood beside, with and
worked around a handful of nurses and an elderly doctor,  as he wrote
out prescriptions for needed medicines.

The folks talked of their fears of being alone without a family in a strange town with nowhere else to go.

The
stories became a long litany of painful narratives, of homes
demolished, of lives turned upside down, and of friends and family gone.

Within
those days after Katrina, as people found temporary shelters or were on
their way to that somewhere else they found for more long-term support,
one statement stood out from the rest.  "They need to stop whining now
and get on with their lives.  They need to get over it as quick as they
can.  We've got enough trouble ourselves."

The local Natchitoches
businessman passing through the town mumbled what many people said
straight out loud.  And it is what I remember the most and what I worry
about too as storms become stronger and as the world is swept up into
tragedies greater and greater through man-made mistakes and climate
change.

"Just get over it" didn't allow the mourning to take
place and the inner hurts to heal so that mental health experts tell us
now that mental health problems are the biggest issue remaining as a consequence from Hurricane Katrina.

Mental
health experts say attention wanders from tragedies, as it did from
Hurricane Katrina, even in a few short days.  We become numb to hurts
and ready to move on ourselves when people don't respond the way we
think they should,whether that's the flooding in Pakistan, the
earthquake in Haiti or a devastating hurricane on the Gulf Coast.  And
our excuse for turning away is "just get over it" rather than the

understanding that grieving is a process for each person that is different from any other.

At the fifth anniversary of Katrina new lessons about deregulation

[caption id="attachment_10141" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="New Orleans 17th St Levee on July 7 2008"][/caption]

 GHN Editor - "Regulatory opponents keep complaining about how much regulation costs, but what they never talk about is the cost of the failure to regulate," in  human consequences. So says Professor Sidney Shapiro, one of the nation's leading experts on regulatory policy, to those who foster belief in deregulation.

This week John Boehner, House Minority leader, calls for deregulation again, which Professor Shapiro says is ill-timed given the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  Regulatory failure brought with it devastating human and monetary consequences, Shapiro underlines. Representative John Boehner is asking for deregulation, as mentioned on Meet the Press, but at the same time also said deregulation was responsible for the crisis.  In response to this, there has been criticism of Boehner's remarks and generalized statement about the need to deregulate while condemning it is hypocritical.


" The fact is that regulatory failure in the case of Katrina cost billions and billions of dollars to say nothing of lives lost," says Shapiro.  He has written a book with Rena Steinzor, entitled The People's Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public: Special Interests, Government, and the Threats to National Health, Safety and the Environment.

In a letter to President Barack Obama, Boehner criticized the administration's plans to implement 191 rules with potential economic costs greater than $100 million, pointing out that "a number... may each have an annual economic cost in excess of $1 billion." But Shapiro says that the costs associated with regulatory failure usually far outweigh the expense of effective government regulation. "Various agencies of the federal government failed to protect the Gulf Coast from the full impact of Katrina, and now all these years later, we are seeing the same thing with the Deepwater Horizon Well," Shapiro said. He used as examples the various other disasters that include the financial meltdown on Wall Street, the recent Toyota recall, mine explosions and e-coli and salmonella outbreaks are also tied to regulatory failure.

"How do we explain these systematic failures? The answer is it's complex, but one problem is that we don't let government agencies do what they're supposed to do because too many people are trying to interfere with the regulatory system that's already in place," he said. Shapiro tells us people need to stop repeating the notion that free markets are good just because it sounds good and that regulation is bad.  Lawmakers need to figure out why the system is not working.

Shapiro concludes. "Regulation is vital, a lesson that regulatory opponents hope we forget despite Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, and all of the other calamities generated by a failure to regulate effectively."