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Read this book. Karen Seeley's Therapy after Terror: 9/11, Psychotherapists, and Mental Health is uniquely disturbing and challenging among the important books on treating the populations and individuals affected by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (see, e.g., Coates, Rosenthal, and Schechter 2003; Danieli and Dingman 2005; see also Apfel and Simon 2005). Seeley has chosen to examine the situation in New York, where she lives and works, and not deal with Washington, D.C., or Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the site of the crash of the plane intended to attack the White House or Capitol.
Several parts of her career come together in this book: a clinician (in private practice, and formerly on the staff of the Furman Counseling Center at Barnard College), a teacher in the Psychology Department at Barnard, a professor in the Anthropology Department at Columbia, and author of a monograph, Cultural Psychotherapy: Working with Culture in the Clinical Encounter (Seeley 2000).
The core of the work that went into this new book is her interviews with thirty-five mental health professionals who had been actively involved in the response to the September 11 disaster. She did not attempt any systematic sampling of therapists; these thirty-five were available and willing to be interviewed. It appears that most of the interviews were conducted in a single sitting (the length and nature of the interviews are not described), but some included later follow-up interviews. The thirty-five included psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists, and half the group “had additional training in psychoanalysis.” Those interviews were augmented by Seeley's attending larger gatherings of therapists, and by her involvement in Psychotherapists for Social Responsibility. Clearly there is a