Earthquake: The Road To Recovery : High Anxiety : Post-Disaster Stress Has Been Deep and Lingering For Many Victims

Six weeks after the Northridge earthquake, Maggie Burns still sits up in her Simi Valley home all night, every night, wrestling a dilemma: In the next quake, which of her two children will she rescue first?

No answer comes by morning light, so she drops her guard just enough for the half-sleep of a brief catnap.

Then nerves consume her and Burns worries again--about the 103-degree fever that grips 5-year-old Kevin every time he goes back to kindergarten and about the thought of ever surrendering Stephanie, 3, to day care again.

And when the earth shakes again after both children go back to their routines, will she race first to pick up Kevin or Stephanie? Stephanie or Kevin?

“I can’t relax at all,” she said Friday. “I’ve been watching the news continually to keep me awake.”

Like many Simi Valley and Fillmore residents shaken by the Jan. 17 earthquake, Burns and her family are beginning to suffer the worst symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychotherapists say.

Nightmares, sleep disorders, overreacting, under-eating, persistent anxiety--all are manifesting themselves in quake victims who had shut down their emotions so they could deal with the physical crisis of putting their homes back in order, they say.

Fueled by an infusion of federal emergency grants, social workers and therapists have fanned out across Ventura County, particularly to hard-hit Simi Valley and Fillmore, to try to ease earthquake victims back to normalcy.

“I think once . . . the initial shock is wearing off, we’re going to be seeing a lot more behaviors start appearing in kids and in families,” said Jennifer Elson, a county mental health worker who is directing in-home and in-school counseling for earthquake victims around the county. “Anxiety levels are excruciatingly high, and people’s nerves are shot.”

The symptoms hit children especially hard because they often lack the capacity to see the quake in perspective, she said.

“To be in a situation where they see their world collapse and they see mom and dad not being able to protect them or their house, it’s like a rug being pulled out from under them, and every safety net they have is gone,” Elson said.

“We’re seeing a lot of PTSD symptoms--the basic ones are refusing to sleep in their bedrooms, nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, irritability and dizziness from sleep deprivation,” she said. “I have kids that are becoming hostile and aggressive; kids are becoming disruptive in the classroom.”

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Dennis Carter, who oversees counseling for the Simi Valley Unified School District, agreed, saying, “There’s kids who were basically OK before the quake, they were well-adjusted and so on, and all of a sudden the quake has thrown them for a loop.”

Adults are suffering, too.

On Thursday, senior-citizen mobile home owners in Simi Valley vented their anxiety to a visiting county mental health worker by continually retelling anecdotes of the day that shook their fragile world.

Maria Busquets and her 91-year-old mother, Demetria Trujillo, told social worker Kenny Aragon how the quake violently shook their home at the Friendly Village mobile home park, throwing their possessions to the floor and Maria’s husband, Rigoberto, into a deep depression.

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He stays in his bedroom much of the day, reluctant to come out, she said. “The medicine doesn’t help for anything,” she told Aragon in Spanish. “You don’t see anything in his face.”

Then the women spilled forth with tales of the family’s time in Cuba under what she called the oppression of Fidel Castro, her eyes welling with tears as she spoke of relatives left behind.

Emerging in bathrobe and unshaven, Rigoberto Busquets spoke pleasantly with the women and with Aragon, telling her he was seeing a doctor for depression and his heart condition.

“When you go to the doctor, does he let you talk, or does he just give you medication?” Aragon asked.

Busquets said the man “is a good doctor;” but Aragon insisted, “It’s important you talk about it. It helps you get back into your routine.”

Moving on toward cases in Fillmore, Aragon said of the family, “This is very common. We start talking about the earthquake, and then we start talking about family issues that the earthquake stirs up. They’ve lived with all this sadness in their lives, and the earthquake topped it off.”

In Fillmore, candles flickered in Soledad Estrada’s living room shrine, lit in a plea to the Virgin of Guadalupe for the family’s safety.

Estrada says she is eating and sleeping better now, and increased doses of sedatives are helping ease the anxiety that struck after “el terremoto” shook her and her husband from their bed.

She, too, told Aragon her earthquake story in vivid detail--how the quake knocked her to the floor every time she stood and how she feared an explosion when she heard the hissing of a broken oxygen tank kept for her husband’s asthma.

“I try to take my mind off it now,” she said. “I pay my bills, I go shopping, I talk to people on the way.”

Leaving the house is good, Aragon told her.

Later, Aragon said that uncertainty from persistent aftershocks and fear of another big earthquake are the biggest hurdles for most people suffering post-quake stress.

“They just want it to be over with,” she said.

There are several ways to alleviate the stress, therapists said.

Talking is one of the best cures, particularly for children, said Sallie Danenberg, a counselor working with Simi Valley schoolchildren for Interface Children-Family Services.

“They have to tell their quake stories over and over and over in an environment in which it feels listened to,” Danenberg said. “It defuses the energy and it normalizes the anxiety and fear. Rather than keeping it inside where it bottles up and grows, they let it outside and it dissipates.”

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Adults should talk about the earthquake and their anxiety, too, Aragon said, adding that it sometimes helps people work through their fears if they prepare for another earthquake by assembling disaster preparedness kits for themselves.

Everyone should realize that anxiety, sleeplessness and other stress-related symptoms are normal--even this long after a quake, said Sue Ruckert, who is overseeing a team of therapists for Catholic Charities.

“Stress from the earthquake is expectable . . . and inevitable,” Ruckert said.

“Many people are having a difficult time settling down and getting past that,” she added. “It was a very hard quake and it’s shaken everybody very much.”