Japan earthquake and nuclear crisis: The mental and physical impacts of stress

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Science journalist Charles Q. Choi is still in Chernobyl, where he's traveling as a tourist alongside health physicist Vadim Chumak, of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine's Research Center for Radiation Medicine in Kiev. Choi's latest dispatch is about the hard-to-quantify effects of Chernobyl. When it comes time to pin blame on the disaster for cancers that happened years, or even decades, later, the studies don't all agree. According to Choi, there's a surprising amount of debate within the scientific community about the extent of Chernobyl's health impacts.

But there was one really interesting thing in Choi's article that jumped out at me:

Whereas the obvious culprit might be radiation, however, other factors might be at play. For instance, elderly people who were allowed to resettle inside the exclusion zone actually live longer than those who were not, Chumak says.

The issue might be stress. "You have all kinds of stress connected with the disaster that can lead to bad habits, such as smoking, drinking, drugs as well as add to disorders such as depression, and that then influences other diseases they can get," Gasanov explains.

More than 350,000 people from the most severely contaminated areas were relocated, and the move from a rural or village home to a completely unfamiliar life in a city apartment for many could have been traumatic, especially for the elderly, Chumak says. And when it comes to liquidators, "there is 'victim syndrome,' where they think they are damaged beyond repair and there is no point in carrying on with their lives," he adds.

The stress associated with disasters is well-known to cause health problems—both mentally, and physically. Given the ways that's played out with the populations affected by Chernobyl, I think it's reasonable to assume that the Japanese are going to be dealing with the public health aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and the nuclear crisis for many years, and in many ways that aren't immediately obvious.

If you live in Japan, or if you have friends and family who are coping directly with these disasters, it would be a very good idea to seek mental health support of some kind in the near future. Whether that's talking with friends and family about the feelings that dealing the disaster has caused, or something more formal like visiting a therapist, it sounds like mental health should be the thing you think about in a disaster situation once your physical safety has been secured.

There's some good pamphlets and information available online, which can help you start the process of coping and healing.

At first, after reading this, I was also worried about how the psychological impacts of a disaster might affect people far removed from the actual disaster site. Especially with 24-hour news, and the social/emotional connections formed by Internet communication, it seemed like people in the rest of the world might still suffer from fear and stress caused by the disasters in Japan, even though we aren't at risk in a direct, physical way. But there is some good news here. Although indirect health impacts do happen, most of the studies show that these impacts are mild and transient.

Those of us who live far from the site of a disaster may feel stress and fear related to what we see on the news. But, because we are physically safe, and because we can separate ourselves from the disaster and easily go back to our normal lives, we are unlikely to experience the serious psychological effects, or any of the long-term physical effects, that could impact people in Japan.

Image: Some rights reserved by alancleaver_2000