Our Views: A long legacy of the storms

The events of August and September 2005 still are vivid to many of us in Louisiana, whether in the metropolitan areas of New Orleans and Lake Charles ravaged during the hurricanes or in places that experienced vast disruptions caused by mass evacuations.

Survivors of the worst of those events continue to exhibit signs of mental stress, a new report indicates.

By chance, New Orleans was chosen in 2003 as one of three cities to interview low-income adults enrolled in community colleges. After Hurricane Katrina hit in August, the researchers decided to continue to track the New Orleans area recipients. The sample of 532 low-income mothers was scattered over 23 states in the diaspora after the storms, but researchers from Princeton University followed up and thus created one of the longer-running such studies.

The study’s report is disturbing: about a third of participants still exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress, while 30 percent exhibited other psychological symptoms. Though levels of distress were below the first analysis 11 months after Katrina, those still were not back to pre-storm levels, researchers said.

“On average, people were not back to baseline mental health and they were showing pretty high levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms. There aren’t many studies that trace people for this long, but the very few that there are suggest faster recovery than what we’re finding here,” said Christina Paxson, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton and lead author on the study. “I think the lesson for treatment of mental health conditions is don’t think it’s over after a year. It isn’t.”

Of course, the poverty that was a chronic problem in the city can stress anyone, but the study participants were, pre-storm, folks enrolled in Delgado Community College or another campus and thus seeking to improve their lot in life. Katrina hit them hard.

We have no data to base this on, but a gut instinct is that the teenagers and pre-teens of 2005 are some of those who now are troubled young adults, either victims or perpetrators — or both — of the violent crime that has afflicted both New Orleans and Baton Rouge in the years since.

That’s not an excuse for violence, but we suspect things might have been different if Katrina and Rita had not come along seven years ago this fall.