Hurricane Katrina caused widespread destruction and more than 1,800 deaths in 2005, much of it in New Orleans. Though a tragedy, psychologists recognized the storm and its aftermath provided an opportunity to better understand the impact such calamities have on children. One such study was conducted by Harvard researchers under lead author Katie McLaughlin, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, and senior author Ronald Kessler, Harvard Medical School’s McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy. It found that cases of serious emotional disturbance — such as anxiety, depression, or inappropriate behavior significant enough to negatively affect a child’s school performance and everyday life — were nearly triple pre-storm levels more than two years after Katrina.
The Gazette spoke with McLaughlin, a psychologist who continues to study the impact of trauma — including the pandemic — on children. McLaughlin spoke about lessons learned from Katrina that could be applied to the current situation and what that might mean for the mental health needs of America’s children in the years to come.
Q&A
Katie McLaughlin
GAZETTE: You were the lead author of a study of serious emotional disturbance in youth after Hurricane Katrina. What were the lessons of that study?
McLAUGHLIN: One of the things we observed in that study is quite consistent with other research on natural disasters, terrorist attacks, other types of community-level, stressful events that lead to widespread disruption. First, a piece of good news, which is that most children afterwards are doing fine. They are not experiencing high levels of emotional distress; they don’t meet criteria for a mental disorder. That is very consistent with what we see following major life stressors of many kinds: on average about half of kids are going to weather those stressors without developing meaningful mental health problems or symptoms of mental disorders.
GAZETTE: When we’re talking about life stressors here, are we talking about the kinds that would happen in during any time, like death of a parent or a job loss of a parent, or something more unique and large-scale?
McLAUGHLIN: This work focused on community-level disruptions, like a natural disaster or severe life events — having a parent die, being exposed to significant violence, being in a life-threatening car accident — where the severity of the stressor is very meaningful. What we’ve learned across lots of different studies is that the most common pattern is resilience — at least half of children develop no meaningful mental health problem even after significant adversity. The less-good news is that the remaining kids tend to experience some elevation in mental health problems. Across studies, you see that 20 to 25 percent develop symptoms of anxiety or depression or an increase in behavior problems that are relatively transient. Typically, within about a year, they come back down to baseline. The other 25 to 30 percent of kids are the ones that we are more concerned about. They develop symptoms that are staying elevated over time. They’re not coming back down to baseline right away, or even a year or two years after the event.
