Katrina Touches The Apple of The Eye

I had weird dreams last night about life in post-Katrina New Orleans.

(The dreams, though not important to this post, involved a meeting of locals at a corner bar and the arrival of two federal FEMA staff agents who, one local said, "smelled like Washington, Chicago, or Santa Fe.  Which is it?"  It was actually Houston.  We do get things wrong here.  Two small federal agents in the middle of a catastrophe, smelling of Santa Fe, are a good metaphor for life after Katrina.)

It's six years down the road, and I'm not sure I ever did put this one behind me.

When you see disasters on the news, it's rarely easy to generate sympathy, no more easy than it is to gin up sympathy for a dying character in a video game.  "That sucks," about sums it up.  But we get on with our lives, and assume that those affected will also. 

I've learned not to look at the floods in Vermont or tsunamis in Japan and allow myself to feel anything: you could never feel enough, you could never judge it rightly.  It's like watching combat on your television: it gives you a rush and a thrill of pity and compassion and anger.  But you haven't been there, and you have no right to tell a soldier what it's like to live inside his head.

When I look back on the things I've felt, done, said, and needed over the last six years, it feels like the life of the mentally ill, a kaleidoscope of dark motivations and inwardness.  Even for a severe introvert like myself, it looks like a misty road.

And it's true, I suffered along with thousands of my fellow exiles from untreated depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder... some have suffered here with deeper, more lasting issues.  The General Accounting Office reported a sharp rise in divorces.  Suicide and intense substance abuse increased dramatically in a town where alcohol and recreational drugs were often a part of the culture.

Something like 16-20% of evacuees responded to surveys in ways that made mental health professionals raise their eyebrows.  Evidently wealth, insurance, and preparation were no defense against whatever dark spirits came in with the floods.  There was no government program to hold that one back.

I saw a psychiatrist, a nice enough guy who wore black boots that made me think of a Victorian Freudian gentleman-doctor.  His fingernails were always really well-trimmed, and he kept a large black cape hanging on a metal hook on his door.  I thought of him as Doctor Boots, and he asked good perceptive questions.  He prescribed drugs that I couldn't afford, and cognitive therapy that insurance wouldn't cover.  I tried out a couple of chemicals on his recommendation that I charged to credit cards: one gave me halluciations, the other kept me awake for three weeks.

I read as much as I could about what I thought I had: depression and PTSD.  I tried to learn how to live with it, since I couldn't (and can't) afford to treat it.  I gave myself a graduate level education in the modern demonology that is psychiatry and psychotherapy.

Sometimes you muddle through because you have to.  I taught myself not to drink when I'm depressed, mostly, to treat alcohol (as Chesterton puts it) "carelessly."   I've carefully avoided drugs, taking a lesson from my friends and colleagues who self-medicate in secret illegality.  (I've no judgments to make.  I just don't want it.)  I've made lots and lots and lots of mistakes, some of them probably good ones, others wastes of time.

I feel awful because of my kids, the things that depression does to them.

Sometimes you muddle through.  A lot of people make it through the worst shock.

But maybe even for those who do, the dreams come.