EMERGENCY personnel who have to deal with accidents and disasters need careful psychological treatment afterwards if they are to avoid post-traumatic stress, a conference in Dublin has heard.
A leading Norwegian specialist, Dr Atle Dyregrov, told the conference that no matter how well trained professionals were, they suffered significant reactions to dealing with the victims or survivors of accidents. These could only be countered by careful psychological debriefing after the event.
The conference on "Critical Incident Stress Debriefing" was organised by Beaumont Hospital and followed a training course last year for emergency staff. The course, which in turn was part of the Dublin Major Accident Plan, was given by Dr Dyregrov, who is director of the Centre for Crisis Psychology in Bergen.
Dr Dyregrov said that although "he had wide experience of dealing with traumatic events, every such incident he had worked in had affected him personally, usually causing weight loss.
He said he suffered nightmares for days after visiting the site of a massacre in Rwanda, where he was helping to train others, including UN personnel, and his reaction would have been worse had he not had help from a colleague. "These events do something to you and your way of life. They shatter some of your basic assumptions," he said.
The problem was often compounded by the failure to address the effects on the professional's family life. He knew of cases where emergency workers returned to the scene of their work rather than stay at home, because they could not deal with the ordinary domestic issues of family life after being involved in a disaster.
Careful psychological debriefing was vital if serious damage was to be avoided, he said. This should include a detailed analysis of decisions made in the heat of an emergency, especially if those decisions might later be the subject of criticism.
The conference was also addressed by Mr Bill Fox, a police welfare officer who co-ordinated psychological debriefings in the aftermath of the Dunblane massacre.
Mr Fox said Dunblane highlighted the extent to which ordinary members of the public could be exposed to the traumas for which emergency professionals were trained. Many civilians were exposed to the full horror of Dunblane, he said, from identifying the victims to manning the emergency helplines to "the unenviable task of cleaning the gymnasium".
