A growing national network of volunteers is dispensing curbside counseling and practical advice at disaster scenes. The Red Cross relief effort, for years, has included teams of psychiatric nurses, social workers and counselors. Last August the American Psychological Association agreed to provide a volunteer force of its own, adding around 1,200 willing APA members to the Red Cross emergency-relief rolls. Volunteer psychologists have pitched in with other relief workers, providing curbside counseling in devastated areas from riot-torn South-Central Los Angeles to hurricane-ravaged southern Miami. “To me it feels like we’re on a psychological SWAT team,” says Judith Wells, a trauma psychologist who was on scene for Hurricane Andrew and the recent floods in Iowa. “We’re getting to people who ordinarily wouldn’t be able to get to us.”
These shrinks go out on food-delivery trucks, fill sandbags and watch for people in distress. “You’re there with a shovel in your hand and your mouth going,” says psychologist Susan Silk, a Californian who was in St. Louis last week teaching other volunteers how to work with flood victims. “People say ‘Uh, oh, here comes the shrink.’ But then they see you’re not out to psychologize.” A key function, Silk says, is to convince people that their feelings of dread and bewilderment are not signs of weakness. “For heaven’s sake, if your house has been under water for a week, it’s a pretty bizarre experience,” she says. Another aim is to get them to share their horror stories with other victims, so they feel less singled out by fate. “It sounds so simple, yet it is magically therapeutic,” says Silk.
Some volunteers are drawn repeatedly to the excitement of working in the trenches. They joke among themselves about being “disaster junkies,” but the experience can be intense, and intensely rewarding. “You form bonds with people, like soldiers in war,” says Karen Sitterle, who began volunteering even before the APA’s disaster-response network was formally established. (Among other calamities, she was there after the October 1991 mass murder of 22 persons in a Killeen, Texas, cafeteria.) Retired University of Washington psychology professor Harry Brammer arrived at a St. Louis flood shelter to begin coordinating mental-health efforts three weeks ago. Almost immediately a woman rushed in crying, “My baby’s dying.” The infant was having trouble breathing. A nurse began cardiopulmonary resuscitation, while Brammer calmed the woman and panicky residents of the shelter. When the baby could breathe freely again, Brammer and the nurse collapsed in each other’s arms and wept.
It’s often hard to keep emotions in check. Volunteers have been putting in 12-hour days, seven days a week in St. Louis. “You have to get away from it, and see something besides destruction and desperation,” says Wells. Part of the psychologists’ job is shoring up the volunteers themselves, to keep them from burning out. Yet volunteers talk mostly about the satisfactions of the work. Brammer, 71, is convinced it’s one of the best things he’s ever done. it has certainly given new meaning to his retirement. “You can only play golf for 30 days,” he says, “and then what? And then, you ask the question, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ And this is a good answer.”
