Fearful Americans head for pantry and bedroom

LOS ANGELES - Sexual activity is up, flying is down and gas mask sales are soaring. People are gorging themselves on candy and ice cream but also ducking for cover at the smallest noise.

Americans are trying to cope with a new, previously unthinkable reality - war and the prospect of further attacks at home.

And it has not been easy.

"To tell you the truth I was not really expecting to return home from PNC Park [baseball stadium] on Friday," said Richard Kubia, a TV sound technician in Pittsburgh.

"I had convinced myself that there would be a symbolic attack on one of our country's shining new ballparks as the last game of the season was played."

The TV production trucks park in a garage which is under hundreds of tonnes of steel and concrete.

"I wasn't too happy about having to be parked indoors from the very beginning of the season, but that garage takes on a whole other mindset now," Kubia said.

Julie, a housewife in Los Angeles, said she thought about buying gas masks for herself, her husband and her two young sons, but then decided it would be futile to try to change one's fate under such circumstances.

"Besides, I didn't want to get caught in a predicament in which the gas mask fitted me but not my child or vice versa," she said.

Risa Mandelberg, owner of a card company in Los Angeles, said she had been waking in the night with nightmares, but had found herself trying to have fun at several weddings since the attacks.

"A lot of people are getting married," she said.

"I went to a wedding right after it happened. There were a lot of tears and the rabbi mentioned the attacks during the ceremony. It was very sad."

Therapists say people's personalities and history determine how they react to trauma, which explains why some are buying antibiotics, fearing a biochemical attack, others are abandoning their diets with a vengeance and some are pretending nothing has changed.

"An event of this kind triggers our personal fears and mobilises our coping skills," said Catherine Riggs-Bergesen, a clinical psychologist in New York.

Not surprisingly, many people in the US are experiencing depression, fear and sleeplessness after witnessing on television or first-hand the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

What is curious, however, is that several psychologists have noted an improvement among some patients who had been treated for depression and anxiety before the attacks.

"I got a phone call this week from a patient I had 20 years ago who was afraid of flying," said Jerilyn Ross, president of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America and a therapist in Washington.

"He said he had taken three flights since the attacks because he had worked so hard to overcome his fear of flying.

"He said all the techniques we used made him less fearful of flying than others right now," she said.

One explanation is that people with anxiety disorders or emotional problems suffer as a result of turning inward.

But now that the external environment is less stable, their problems seem less serious.

Many Americans are forging ahead with events, such as weddings, business and family trips, but many are hunkering down in ways that are reminiscent of past wars.

Indeed, some experts say that many people are turning to food, shopping, movies and sex as a means of escaping and coping.

Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist, said there were many reasons people had sex during crises.

Times of high anxiety, she said, produced strong emotions which caused people to fall in love more intensely, decide more often to get married, and to have more sex.

This last activity also served as a temporary escape.

"It's blotting out the world and living in a moment of heightened pleasure as opposed to heightened peril or depression," Schwartz said.

Schwartz predicted a "baby boomlet" would follow nine months after the attacks, but one not nearly as big as the baby boom that followed the end of the Second World War.

- REUTERS

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