As already pointed out by a quoted trauma expert, the participates of this research is not necessarily victims of 9/11. Some might just not have strong feelings about the event after 7 years had passed, not that they do not want to share.
With regard to the health condition / length of response correlation. We can argue that when one lets the negative memories stay in the system and be affected by it, one's health condition will not be high. The sharing or not sharing of such feelings therefore might not be the factor of the lower health condition, but the general negative mental deposition. However, we can also argue the other way around that when one's health condition is low, one tends to remember negative events more vividly and be affected by it for longer period of time. Which also does not support the conclusion drew by the author of the experiment either.
All in all, the experiment is not well designed to answer the questions at hand.
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Let’s Not Talk About It
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Seery also found an interesting correlation between the level of sharing and well-being. Participants could decide how much they wanted to report about their feelings on the survey. The written responses they gave ranged from sentence fragments like "Feels terrible" to multiple paragraphs. And, says Seery, there was a correlation between those who wrote the lengthier, more in-depth descriptions of their feelings and those who had worse mental and physical statuses.
However, one trauma expert cautions against drawing strong conclusions from a national survey in which many of the participants are not necessarily victims of trauma. While September 11 certainly shocked Americans, that doesn't necessarily mean it was "traumatic" for the entirety of the national sample, says Nina K. Thomas, who chairs the postdoctoral specialization in trauma and disaster studies at New York University. "It was a catastrophic event that he's studying, but it's not clear that it had a traumatic impact in the way that many of us would talk about trauma," says Thomas, who explains that the definition of trauma usually includes particular symptoms of distress, like poor quality of sleep.
So it's plausible that many of those who chose not to express their feelings did not have a traumatic experience related to the terrorist attacks. And that, Thomas says, makes it a bit unclear how to determine what the research says about those who are indeed victims of trauma. Thomas does, however, agree with Seery's notion that trauma victims, not friends or psychologists, are the ones who should determine the appropriate way to react. "The immediate victims of whatever trauma are the ones who are the ultimate deciders about how much sharing or talking is right," says Thomas.
Does the study turn conventional wisdom completely on its head, suggesting that it's better to stay quiet in the aftermath of a traumatic event? Not quite. Seery explains that the respondents who felt the need to divulge their emotions started off in a worse mental and physical state in the first place, likely a bit more susceptible to the stress of a collective traumatic event. "The people who were talking were probably more distressed by the event," says Seery. "The initial distress motivated them to want to have some place to talk about it … whereas people who chose not to talk were less likely to say that they were trying cope." The take-home message, then, is that there is no one right way to react to traumatic events; there is a wide range of normal and healthy responses to tragedy.
© 2008
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