The Northridge Quake: One Year Later : Still Trembling : Many Children Remain Haunted by Quake Experiences, Experts Say

The youngest draw pictures to describe feelings they lack the words to express, depicting tents, sad people camped out in cars and houses marred by angry cracked lines.

Older children meet in groups, finding comfort that their nightmares, insecurities and continuing sadness are not unique.

Still others, with more serious behavioral or emotional problems, spend hours with therapists describing the mental agony of out-of-work parents, homelessness and other earthquake-spawned ills.

Although some children who were emotionally wounded by the Northridge earthquake have made tremendous strides over the past year, many others have a long way to go, experts and therapists say.

According to a Los Angeles Times Poll taken Jan. 7-9, one-quarter of the parents in Los Angeles County--and about two in five parents in the hardest-hit San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys--report that their children still suffer nightmares and other problems.

On Tuesday, therapists at Los Angeles schools reported that the combined anniversary of the quake and haunting televised images of fresh seismic trauma in Japan again triggered fear, panic and helplessness many children thought they had left behind.

Those feelings “can become chronic over time, especially when they are faced with numerous reminders and aftershocks,” said Dr. Robert S. Pynoos, the director of UCLA’s Trauma Psychiatry Service and a leading expert on disasters and the mental health of children.

At Woodland Hills Elementary School, children took turns Tuesday telling their teacher and a visiting social worker they are still afraid.

Publicity about the quake anniversary was enough to send some of them scurrying to sleep in their parents’ beds again, they said. Images from Kobe, Japan--and worries about how the children there are faring--sealed for some students the idea that they might never be safe.

“It reawakens fears that may have been beginning to heal,” said JoAnne Tuell, a psychiatric social worker who spoke to the children Tuesday. “For so many of the children, last year was their first traumatic experience. Now they know that it can happen again.”

One child asked if the Kobe temblor meant that there would be an earthquake every Jan. 17.

Other principals, fearing those discussions would revive old pains, decided not to have any commemorative events Tuesday.

More than 241,000 children received crisis counseling from Jan. 17 to mid-November through the county’s Project Rebound, a Federal Emergency Management Agency-funded mental health recovery program, said Risa Palley Flynn, who coordinates the project’s services for school-age children. That number includes everything from onetime rap sessions to ongoing therapy.

One year later, the number of referrals and inquiries by students, teachers and parents has not significantly tapered off, Flynn said.

Flynn, leafing through recent reports from the Project Rebound therapists, said the children’s own descriptions of their fears best explain the continuing problems:

* A 6-year-old girl assured a clinician that she was no longer afraid. But then she drew a picture of a tilted house, with a very bright light and a butterfly. “That’s the light that I keep on in the bathroom ever since the earthquake,” she explained to the counselor, pointing to her drawing. “And the butterfly is flying away because it is scared.”

* One boy told counselors he did not want to move back into his family’s newly repaired home. The elementary school student said he felt safer in the mobile home his family has been living in since the quake.

Lynn Ponton, a professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco and an expert in how children respond to disaster, said it is a myth that children are resilient and able to overcome trauma on their own.

“Parents say, ‘Kids are resilient, my kids will recover,’ but that’s not what we see,” said Ponton, who has worked with children who experienced the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the 1993 Midwest floods and the Northridge quake. “To hide behind that phrase really deprives a whole group of children of the proper assessment and treatment they need.”

As part of a study five months after the quake, UCLA’s Pynoos, in conjunction with FEMA and the Los Angeles Unified School District, examined how children were affected by the quake initially, and tracked how they were reacting to it several months later. They found a significant number of children were physically threatened during the quake. The children reported being trapped, hit by falling objects and cut. Many also witnessed injuries to family members.

One in seven children in the Los Angeles school district said they were hurt. Forty percent said they thought they were going to die. These children were more likely to show signs of significant mental trauma, Pynoos said.

Other indicators of mental distress are children who were displaced, live in visibly damaged homes or lost a pet during the quake.

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Children who suffered secondary effects of the quake--relocation, or parents losing jobs--showed increased signs of depression, Pynoos said.

Suzanne Silverstein, the president of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s Psychological Trauma Center, suggested asking quake-traumatized children what they remember about the quake and if the quake seems as scary now as it was then.

As much as students might need help, the clock is ticking on the programs that have allowed the county’s Department of Mental Health to hire additional counselors and send them into the schools.

Flynn said FEMA’s most recent nine-month grant, which has funneled $844,670 directly to the Los Angeles school district on top of the money given to other agencies that serve children, runs out in February and is unlikely to be renewed. Times staff writer Beth Shuster contributed to this report.