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Just as Susan Coates, Jane Rosenthal, and Daniel Schechter were preparing to hold a conference about trauma and human bonds, the catastrophic
events of September 11th erupted into contemporary American history. The authors changed their focus to include current events. The book September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds that came out of that conference, is a collection of multidisciplinary studies of the emotional effects of trauma and of the attack on the World Trade Center.
As I began reading their study, I suddenly found myself hyper-alert and breathing fast. I was in the midst of remembering wars I have known about and experienced, both the private wars of people surviving belligerent and dangerous families and individual events, and the more public wars of the Middle East and elsewhere. I remembered what it had been like to work together with the NPAP community after 9/11. We had been suffused with fear and terror and the inescapable smell of those horrible burning buildings and of people becoming wraiths. We sought comfort from one another and turned our own terrors into energy to help. We offered psychotherapeutic first aid at our brownstone on West 13th Street and in psychoanalysts' homes and offices in the days and weeks after September 11th. We reviewed the literature on trauma and taught one another and ourselves what to do amidst this public grief. Daniel Herman, Barbara Pape Aaron, and Ezra Susser, authors of the chapter “An Agenda for Public Mental Health in a time of Terror,” confirmed that the emergency counseling provided ad hoc by volunteers had a beneficial impact on the citizens of New York. Lawrence Amsel and Randall Marshall proposed in their section of this book that as a consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attack, individuals are now less stigmatized by their need for professional mental health services
Another chapter on an epidemiologic study of the New York City public school system was conducted by Christina Hoven, Donald Mandell, and Cristiane D