STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The physical devastation of the Los Angeles wildfires is plain.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
What's not as clear is how the destruction is affecting people's mental health. And that weighs on residents' lives, even if it's harder to quantify than the value of someone's house.
INSKEEP: NPR's Katia Riddle is in Los Angeles. Katia, good morning.
KATIA RIDDLE, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: How do you see this aspect of the story?
RIDDLE: Well, I was at an evacuation center yesterday, and there were a lot of people who still just looked very dazed as they waited in line for resources like FEMA paperwork or services from the Red Cross. Experts I've talked to have pointed out that even for people here who weren't forced to evacuate, there can be ripple effects. If someone you know is affected, the trauma response can be contagious.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
RIDDLE: And then some people are still awaiting the possibility that they will have to evacuate. So the cycle of trauma is still very much happening. One thing that is unique to these kinds of natural disasters is that people are grieving not just their own homes and communities, but there's a kind of grief for the land that happens. LA, you know, is a place of just staggering, really breathtaking beauty, and people here rely on that natural environment for emotional support. Here's a gentleman named David Eisenman. He's talking about a hike that he and his wife would take regularly in the Palisades.
DAVID EISENMAN: It would just calm us down and center us and make everything right for the moment, and we've lost that. And that was - when my wife and I heard that, we turned to each other, and I think we had tears in our eyes. I mean, we really felt the loss of the forest.
RIDDLE: Eisenman is a doctor here in Los Angeles, and he is also an expert in disaster response. He's the director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters. He's studied this phenomena. It has a name - solastalgia. He says solastalgia can be just as real as any other kind of grief and that it needs to be addressed with mental health strategies.
INSKEEP: OK, mental health strategies. What do you do?
RIDDLE: Well, there are evacuation centers throughout the city with mental health providers on call to help people who are in crisis. Many of them are practicing something called psychological first aid. That's a kind of CPR equivalent of mental health care.
INSKEEP: Wow.
RIDDLE: It means working with people to identify and address their immediate needs - things like shelter and food, medication - in service of supporting their mental health. Like I said, I visited one of these shelters yesterday. Clinicians there said they have seen hundreds of people in the last week. While I was there, I talked with Lisa Wong. She's LA County's director of the Department of Mental Health. She said her staff across the city have really risen to the occasion. But she says, in a way, people still have a lot of adrenaline. This is the easy part.
LISA WONG: I think that is the real challenge, the sustainability of these efforts, and also the longer-term care of folks who have gone through such devastation. People are going to need support in the workforce and in the community.
INSKEEP: And some are going to need that support while they're trying to deal with a home that was destroyed, rebuilding a neighborhood that has changed beyond recognition, which makes me wonder, Katia, as you're talking, are we thinking in terms here of post-traumatic stress?
RIDDLE: Well, research shows that most people will not develop debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder in these kinds of situations. But even if folks aren't at risk of developing PTSD, it's well documented that wildfires are correlated with increases in anxiety and depression in communities. In Los Angeles, as in many places, there are shortages of clinicians like psychiatrists and psychologists and just not enough people to provide one-on-one mental health care for all the people who will need it. Several experts I've talked to here have pointed out that in the face of increased disasters like this one, the mental health system is not equipped to handle the resulting needs.
INSKEEP: NPR's Katia Riddle in Los Angeles. Take care of yourself, OK?
RIDDLE: Thanks, Steve. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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