The website, MySonomaStrong, lets users self-assess their potential traumas and connect to resources anonymously.  

Some natural disaster survivors will not go to traditional treatment centers because they don’t want to deal with the feelings associated with the trauma, or survivors are in a place without mental health services, said Josef Ruzek of the National Center for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. 

Online tools can reach a large population in a variety of languages for low cost, Ruzek said. 

Ruzek helped develop MySonomaStrong and an app, Sonoma Rising, for the wildfire survivors. He said the programs can be used not just to help people acknowledge and track individual progress, but also could be integrated into traditional therapy. 

The website and app let users self-assess their potential traumas and connect to resources anonymously. 

Todd Player of MySonomaStrong said the website can “meet people where they are.” 

Susan Dunn uses MySonomaStrong to track her progress and monitor how she is feeling after a fire destroyed parts of her neighborhood. 

Certain sights, sounds and smells can act as a trigger for Dunn. 

“Oh, I smelled smoke. Now it’s happening again for me,” Dunn said.

Although she did not lose her house, she said her entire community was traumatized, with symptoms that won’t go away. 

“There’s been lots of trauma in that neighborhood, during the fires, and you just don’t take anything for granted after an experience like this,” Dunn said.

Player said the response grew after the second year because of 2018 wildfires in neighboring counties, and says that over 3,000 people now use the website.

“To some who look at web sites like Google or Facebook which get millions of visits per day that doesn’t seem like a lot, but I like to remind people this is mental health counseling not social media or an e-commerce site,” Player said. “If I took any provider and lined up even 100 people outside their door who wanted to talk about services or wanted actual therapy, they would feel inundated and that would be a huge number. So I look at that and say it’s really quite successful at reaching people who need help.”

He said driving through the county is still surreal. 

There might be three or four houses clumped together, with nothing left except the fireplace and the foundation, Player said. “You can drive another 250 feet, and they’ll be houses that are completely unscathed.”

Ruzek said there is a growing interest and need for mental health-related to natural disasters, but involving the internet is a very new development. He sees a future where survivors can use their phones to help learn coping skills, connect to other survivors and check their trauma. 

Surrounding counties and California government are asking the Healthcare Foundation Northern Sonoma County to replicate the website and app for their communities, said the foundation’s CEO Debbie Mason.

She said this September, the foundation will start advertising more heavily for the anniversary of the fire. 

“We constantly need to be in front of people so that when they decide they’re ready for help, they know where they can get the free tools to get help,” Mason said. 

Mental health professionals in Sonoma are especially worried about its residents because of economic stress after the fires, said Mason.

The average daily rate in April 2019 is down a little over 4% compared to the same time last year.

When the fires hit Sonoma, 2017 was the first year the county didn’t experience any population growth since 1860. Over 3,300 people moved from Sonoma County in 2018, according to World Population Review.

Mason said people are still leaving.

“Everybody is feeling it,” said Mason, adding that even mental health professionals are overwhelmed with the need in Sonoma. “Everybody feels exhausted. We’ve got a community that’s really, really hurting right now.”

Sarah Beth Guevara

Sarah Beth Guevara is a senior at the University of Oklahoma where she is finishing a degree in journalism and a minor in vocal music. She currently serves as president of  the National Association of Hispanic Journalists at OU. She is also a Gaylord Ambassador. The bilingual journalist has interned with the Enid News and Eagle and News 9. She’s also written for OU Nightly, Gaylord News Oklahoma, Monkey Cage….and [UNFILTERED], a student media project with KWTV News 9. In the fall she will be a wire reporter for Gaylord News in Washington, D.C.

The post California’s wildfire survivors go online for mental health aid appeared first on State of Emergency | News21.

Then came Michael. 

On Oct. 10, 2018, Hurricane Michael landed at Mexico Beach, Florida, and swept across the Gulf Coast westward through Panama City. The brunt of the damage from the massive storm stopped short of the highway bridge that divides the tourist-hub Panama City Beach from its underlooked neighbor, Panama City proper.

Along with leveled buildings, downed electric poles and wide scale debris, the storm also brought psychological trauma upon Panhandle residents who, more than eight months after the hurricane, are still recovering physically and mentally. 

“People here, whenever we hear a heavy wind, we see the rain, now we get the PTSD, the anxiety, the depression,” Dossie said. “I’m seeing a psychiatrist about it. I have no problems telling everybody about it.”

Since Hurricane Michael, many residents of the Florida Panhandle – including Dossie – have dealt with mental health issues related to the storm. 

As many as four in 10 survivors can experience a mental or behavioral disorder after a natural disaster, according to the American Psychological Society.

A study on mental health from Bay District Schools reported a shortage of mental health resources in Bay County was made worse with the increased need for mental health services after Hurricane Michael. 

Project Hope is a prevention-oriented crisis counseling program in Panama City funded by FEMA and meant to help individuals affected by Hurricane Michael. It offers free mental health services for community members struggling with the mental toll of the hurricane aftermath. 

Mental health experts warn that trauma peaks seven to 10 months after a storm, putting Panama City currently in that range. 

As the storm rattled the walls of his house, Dossie realized that this storm would hit harder than the many that came before it. Slowly, the confident excitement he had in the calm moments before the storm hit turned into fear and panic as the severity of his situation became as clear as the reality that he had no choice but to stand pat.  

Dossie waited out the storm from inside the bathroom of his home as Michael reshaped the landscape outside. 

“Hurricane Michael came to me, literally knocking on my door, tearing my windows down,” Dossie said.

Then he remembered the pine tree looming above his home as it always had, but now, waiting to drop like a hammer at the unpredictable discretion of Category 5 wind speeds.

Dossie outlasted the storm, however, his property was less fortunate. 

It took 26 days for him to regain power, and the neighboring structures on his lot – including the house he grew up in, just feet away from the house he currently resides in – were severely damaged by the storm. 

“At that moment, I got all afraid and stuff like that, shaking because I realized I’m a house-and-a-half away from what could have possibly been my death,” Dossie said.

After Hurricane Michael, the roots beneath the pine tree slowly began to pull above the ground and brought a lean and wobble to the tree’s ordinarily upright posture. When the rain falls, the soil around its roots softens and the risk of it toppling through Dossie’s already damaged house increases. 

On top of the headache of coordinating the recovery of his home damaged by the storm, Dossie said he spends each night with an added fear that the timber will come crashing through what is left of his house while he sleeps.  

“I appear to cope, but I have my moments,” Dossie said. “When the wind’s blowing, I’m peeping out my window at that tree.” 

Inflated prices for tree removal services – one of several forms of price gouging reported by residents in the area – in addition to a lack of insurance and resources from FEMA combined to prevent Dossie from cutting down the tree threatening his home.

The mental toll that accompanied the long grind of recovery presented itself throughout Bay County in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael.

“We’ve had a lot of suicides,” Bay County Sheriff’s Office Financial Crimes Investigator Dennis Rozier said. “We’ve had a rise in suicides here which is pretty tragic in itself. Hasn’t been good.”

More than nine months later, Panama City is faced with an uncertain timeline and path towards full recovery. 

“You’re looking at a year or two from this point, probably,” said Trey Hutt, president of Hutt Insurance Agency in Panama City and a resource for locals navigating the recovery process. “Full recovery of the community might be three years, five years, 10 years. We really don’t know.”

The towering, unstable tree still teeters outside of Dossie’s home as he, and the rest of the city, endures the elongated recovery process post-Michael. 

“I look at it like I have a mental injury, not a mental illness,” Dossie said. “With an injury, just like if you injure your foot, you go to the doctor. You get your foot healed. And then you know you’re back at it again. So then I get my mental psyche healed and I’m back good to go.”

News 21 reporters Katie Hunger and Sarah Beth Guevara contributed to this report.

Jake Goodrick

Jake Goodrick is a recent graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, earning a master’s degree in sports journalism. Before Cronkite, he graduated summa cum laude from Cleveland State University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. As a reporter for Cronkite News and Arizona PBS, Goodrick covered the Phoenix Suns, ASU men’s basketball and the Chicago White Sox. His work can be found in The Arizona Republic, Indian Country Today, The Navajo Times and MLB.com.

The post Panama City man struggles with the mental toll of the storm appeared first on State of Emergency | News21.

“It’s like a freight train,” said McCullough about the 2011 tornado that destroyed a third of the homes in Joplin, Missouri.

“This one had more of a grinding noise because of all the cars that were in there hitting one another.”

Glass cut his feet as he ran down from the second floor apartment. Within an hour of the tornado striking Joplin, McCullough began working with the Ozark Center, a nonprofit mental health center.

He did not stop for weeks. As a mobile crisis counselor, McCullough was used to providing mental health counseling after deadly events, but nothing on this scale.

Six minutes after the seventh deadliest tornado in the U.S. hit, St. John’s Regional Medical Center was on fire. In all, 161 people died. The disaster left over 1,150 injured. The tornado flattened 13 miles and destroyed 8,000 buildings.

McCullough and others at the Ozark Center realized their city of 50,000, didn’t have enough counseling help to handle the wave of people traumatized by the storm, leading them to train those without proper mental health backgrounds to provide emotional support to those who didn’t need clinical help, but someone to listen and provide emotional support.

The Ozark Center program, Healing Joplin, is now a national model used by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for how a smaller community can provide mental health services after a major disaster, said Vicky Mieseeler, chief administrative officer at the Ozark Center.  

Healing Joplin still operates, serving 195,000 people in the Joplin area over the last eight years. It has provided crisis counseling to over 21,000 people who said they had never sought mental health help before, according to the center.  

The mental health program also provided employment to 47 Joplin residents who lost jobs because of businesses destroyed by the storm.

“They were able to get a job and get back on their feet. But they were also helping others, which was incredibly important to many people in the community,” Mieseler said.

Before the tornado, Ozark Center crisis center received an average of 400 calls per month, but the year after the tornado the calls doubled each month. Even now, eight years after the storm, more people still are seeking counseling, some of them people who never would have thought of needing mental health help, McCullough said.

“Midwest culture is to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and take care of business,” McCullough said. “People were more worried about their neighbors than themselves, but when they really started thinking about it, they weren’t OK.”

McCullogh said the Ozark Center created Healing Joplin after reading studies that indicated people who survived 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina didn’t necessarily need clinical help, but did need someone to talk to in the following months and years.

“We’re further ahead than anybody would expect us to be at this stage,” McCullough said. “Joplin had an amazing response.”

Mieseler said that sometimes people would be busy for years before life slowed down and tornado victims realized they still needed help. A 2008 study “Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following disasters,” in Psychological Medicine showed post-disaster PTSD is still “substantial” after almost 30 years, especially in cases where there was a high death toll.

Ozark Center officials know members of their community still struggle with mental health issues. McCullough said some people still reference time based off the tornado, even eight years since it split the town in two.  

The center also helps people who didn’t realize for years that they were traumatized by the storm – until their busy lives showed down. The Ozark Center also welcomed researchers into their community, to measure the psychological impact of the storm.

While depression subsided after the storm, some residents later suffered post traumatic stress, according to one study.

Two and a half years after the tornado, Brian Houston, the director of the Disaster and Community Crisis Center at the University of Missouri, did a study finding that while the number of people who had depression symptoms decreased by about 8 percent, PTSD increased by about 14 percent. That would mean over a quarter of Joplin’s tornado survivors were likely battling PTSD at the time, according to his study.

“Immediately after a disaster, you’ll often see things like #JoplinStrong and that helps some people cope in the short-term,” Houston said. “But then with the challenges of rebuilding or recovering from an event, the realities settles in. People are going to face those realities and struggle.”

His study found those less educated and under the poverty line had a higher risk of PTSD. Nearly 18 percent of people in Joplin are under the poverty line. Only a quarter of Joplin residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

“The recovery time for the major events is not short and can take quite a bit of time,” Houston said.

For some, that recovery is still ongoing, even eight years later. Joshua Lockwood was 21 when the tornado hit his hometown. At first, he said he was fine, aside from a hard time sleeping, but that it was “about 2016” that he realized something was wrong and went to seek help. He wound up diagnosed with PTSD, depression and anxiety and said his anxiety symptoms prevent him from driving when it is raining.

“I still have those dreams every once in a while, but my dreams were getting more tornado-centric,” Lockwood said. “Coupled with it getting close to storm season, I realized I’m still kind of messed up.”

Lockwood’s struggle mirrors his community’s, which continues to this day and gets exacerbated when new tornadoes hit in or near Joplin. The most recent such tornado happened on the eight-year anniversary of the 2011 tornado, when tornadoes hit the nearby towns of Golden City and Carl Junction on May 22-23.

But McCullough and Healing Joplin were there to provide mental first aid for the communities in southwest Missouri, just as they were for Joplin when they were needed the most.

Sarah Beth Guevara

Sarah Beth Guevara is a senior at the University of Oklahoma where she is finishing a degree in journalism and a minor in vocal music. She currently serves as president of  the National Association of Hispanic Journalists at OU. She is also a Gaylord Ambassador. The bilingual journalist has interned with the Enid News and Eagle and News 9. She’s also written for OU Nightly, Gaylord News Oklahoma, Monkey Cage….and [UNFILTERED], a student media project with KWTV News 9. In the fall she will be a wire reporter for Gaylord News in Washington, D.C.

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