9/11, Global Terrorism and Health

On this, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, we find that survivors have not done very well (Brackbill et al., 2009). The rate of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in subjects studied, rose to 19 percent, a five percent increase from the survey performed two to three years after the attacks on about 71,000 registrants. This counterintuitive increase in psychiatric problems bears closer examination: the brain responds differently to extremely terrifying and completely unexpected events (Hirst et al., 2009). Extreme terror is a freeze response to fear that is completely unexpected and beyond anything thinkable. The recollections of such events are called flashbulb memories and are activated through the amygdala in a unique neurocircuitry found to be shown only in those close to the exploding buildings in lower Manhattan, and, whose activation might possibly be decades later (Sharot, Martorella, Delgado & Phelps, 2007). We know that people with traumatic stress disorders become either very withdrawn from the social culture or highly reactive and startled by even minor shocks or both. Most of these events make it very difficult for them to manage the ebb and flow of every day life. Unfortunately, the treatment of PTSD is not nearly as good as one might have hoped for and we now know that we live very frequently with a poorly treated problem with long-term sequelae that may be difficult to modify.

From a larger scale social perspective, such terror is irresistible, unthinkably shocking and mind freezing. It creates demonization of the enemy which itself leads to violence and a mindset that cannot negotiate. Highly intelligent people's minds become uncreative, perseverative, with few creative response options that often shock them when they come out of the victimized mindset and see what they have said. An account of such a response is given in Twemlow (2005), wherein a respected colleague in his response to the article became furious about Twemlow's depiction of a