Hurricane Maria’s legacy: Thousands of Puerto Rican students show PTSD symptoms
I know a CAT 4 hurricane is something to be reckoned with, but it also makes me wonder how humans have ever survived anything, ever.
Any sort of sustained mortal threat where flight is impossible can do it, though I suspect unnatural dangers are more intuitively disturbing than natural ones.
I’ve been through bad hurricanes, none gave me any lasting anxiety never mind full blown PTSD. I’ve been through other mortal threats (almost killed by a dog as a child) and although the damage lasted a while it didn’t stick over the long term, as the threat in that case lasted all of 30 seconds. By 10 years later all discomfort with dogs was gone.
In the WTC bombing, it took an hour and a half to get out, the stairwell was packed three people to a stair and was barely moving as new people entered from lower floors. The stairwell was already smoky to begin with and just got worse over time. Around the 15th floor the crowd thinned out and I must have covered those last 15 floors and got out the door in under a minute. I could not have hurled myself down those stairs any faster!
The whole thing has been compounded by the network of lies that surrounded it, and then again to the Nth degree by 9/11... which I had predicted at about 4pm on 2/26/93, after witnessing the emergency vehicles wall-to-wall everywhere and realizing that the response itself would make one hell of a target for a follow-up attack. As I had just survived an attack hours earlier, it wasn’t exactly out there to worry about another one.