9/11 Aftershocks

Do you remember where you were twenty-two years after 9/11? Of course you do… 

In the early post 9/11 days many clinicians were dispatched to New York. However, that fate would not fall to me. Instead, I was instead sent to corporations in and around Washington DC. One site included the major U.S. airline carrier just outside of Washington. 

At the time immediately following the disaster, subsequent to the aircraft downed across the U.S., many employees were facing massive layoffs at the airline call-centers near Washington. The employees were tearful as they tirelessly worked to address and manage the record numbers of calls coming into the airline from customers who had no idea when flights to workplace or home destinations would resume. One supervisor at the airline carrier hinted that they were facing potential layoffs of 10,000 workers. 

We do not often have the opportunity to peer through the windows of and bear witness to the many aftershocks of the 9/11 disaster story. In addition to men and women killed in New York along with children raised without the benefit of fathers and mothers, there were myriad employees affected in differing areas of the country that no one talks about and whose workplace fate was never known. 

In another quarter, I visited a major U.S. communications company in Washington DC. The employees there were locked down under armed guard at the time of the disaster and were transitioned into essential employees, as they controlled the communication networks in Washington DC. They told me that they were not paid enough to remain behind as the masses were literally walking out of Washington DC in droves the day of the tragedy. 

The scale of the Washington evacuation was highlighted by a senior vice president employed at a Bank in the heart of Washington D.C. near Capital Hill. She stated that she and a number of executives witnessed the airliner heading toward the Pentagon from the penthouse of her building. Later, as she was attempting her own exit from the city, she relayed that she was picking up Washingtonian strangers who were traipsing out on foot. She asserted that the day was surreal and simply could not believe that she was picking up pedestrians under any circumstances. Moreover, she reported that she experienced solace by her own act of bravery, which she conveyed - surprised her. 

In the weeks that followed 9/11, I was asked to visit an international investment bank to see clients who were temporarily displaced and relocated from New York to Baltimore. Many were shaken and in deep distress, as they were asked to leave families and communities to work in temporary make-shift office cubicles while many of the companies were themselves traumatized by the events that caused catastrophic disruption to their firms. 

As a clinician and trained as a Critical Incidence Stress Debriefing (CISD) responder, it was not my role to engage in a therapeutic process but to host small homogeneous groups of employees to debrief their respective experiences and to uncover vulnerable individuals to be further referred for clinical assessment and treatment if needed to prevent PTSD from taking root. 

Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) is specifically defined as: a supportive exercise bringing together a small group to engage in a crisis intervention implementing specific techniques to promote discussion of a formidable traumatic incident collectively experienced by the group. The goal includes stress reduction and restoration of employee unity along with a resumption of workplace performance. CISD is essentially an experience sharing exercise combined with psycho-educational knowledge to help normalize reactions and responses to the incident encouraging recovery. 

When an individual’s coping capacity is overwhelmed, it is essential to restore functioning reducing the long term impairment or dysfunction. CISD responders are deployed to all manner of crises to assuage trauma when individuals at companies or disaster sites where crisis and trauma occur. The evidence demonstrates that incidence of PTSD can be reduced or avoided when individuals are immediately served by clinicians. 

For more information on CISD, see the links below. 

http://www.info-trauma.org/flash/media-e/mitchellCriticalIncidentStressDebriefing.pdf