Experts also needed help

By JULIE MIDDLETON

"The stuff most horrific to them and most challenging was utter helplessness - watching people leaping out of buildings, having bodies fall around you like hail, and the fact you could not save anybody."

Canadian trauma expert Donna Tona (Weekend Herald, September 22) has just completed two "solid" weeks counselling more than 50 counsellors - mental health experts, psychologists and therapists who supported rescue and construction workers, nurses and doctors as they scrabbled for survivors in the rubble left by the September 11 terror attacks in the United States.

That counsellors should need their own counselling may seem over the top. But nothing could have prepared even them, experts in remedying human distress, for such a huge event, says Tona.

The 42-year-old Canadian, who is coming to New Zealand next month, worked with those who supported emergency personnel at "ground zero" in New York, Washington and Philadelphia.

"When they had finished their tour of duty, they had to come to me for debriefing," she says.

The common characteristic of these intense sessions of several hours each was the counsellors' feelings of utter helplessness, she says.

At this point she engages in emotionless clinical-speak, but you get the picture: counsellors' impotence in the face of such devastation, she says, was "challenging and highly disappointing" for them.

For many, the experience has been a double-edged sword.

Many of those at ground zero were office-based clinicians "not used to seeing people at their worst" or who had not been on the front-line for some time.

One experienced hospital emergency nurse who spent two solid weeks at the World Trade Center - probably too long, says Tona - had a hard time keeping her perspective.

"It was the bodies not being whole, not being intact, and she could not sleep and was having an awful time.

"Every time she saw a body at the site, her mind kept going back to seeing bodies at the hospital, traumatised bodies from car accidents."

Some had difficulty with the demolition workers' stoicism and their apparently unemotional, get-on-with-it attitude.

Others admitted that they had become frightened of anyone with a Middle Eastern appearance.

The work of some was overshadowed by the fear that their children would be drafted into the military.

Two female therapists struggled to work with a class of trainee flight attendants who graduated as the terrorism unfolded - and then refused to fly.



"The therapists worked with them for about three solid days and got them all back in the air when the skies were open again," she says.

"The challenge for them was that they didn't know how to get these attendants to fly again: traditional methods were not working.

"They had to walk them one step at a time."

To keep her own perspective, Tona did not visit any of the terror sites - she was based in Baltimore - but met her charges elsewhere.

She also had to push aside her own feelings - not just the horror, but her "rage" at the Canadian Government, which she says was slow to act after the attacks.

"I had to sit on it and put it out of my mind, but I made a very conscious decision to revisit it before I got home."

Tona herself was debriefed twice: once in the US by a psychologist friend, and once again at home.

She did not feel that any of the people she worked with needed referral to long-term counselling.

"I bring into play their own internal coping skills, which just get lost when you're traumatised."

* Donna Tona, of Trauma Management Training Services, is in New Zealand next month to give two seminars: How to support your staff in a crisis (November 22 and 23, Wellington) and Interview profiling (November 16, Auckland). Phone Peter Rudd, project manager at the Institute for International Research, (09) 308-3760, or check out the IIR website.