Abstract
I have a “story” to tell, an “account” to share about my involvement in the topic of “disasters, stress and cognition.” For the last several years, I have presented two-and five-day workshops on post-traumatic stress disorders, consulted with mental health workers who conduct critical incident stress debriefing with disaster victims, and worked with clinicians who are responsible for the treatment of traumatized clients with PTSD and other clinical disorders. These activities have taken me around the world. In the course of conducting these presentations, I have developed a “condition” or “symptom” of what psychiatrists call “ideas of reference,” namely, the belief that an individual can cause important events to occur. Consider the following litany of recent experiences that I have encountered. When I presented in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Hurricane Bob arrived; in Clearwater, Florida, the largest flood of the century occurred; in Los Angeles on two occasions there were major earthquakes during the time of my consultation, and on my latest visit, there were major mudslides. When I visited Milwaukee the water supply went bad. When I visited Hong Kong the talks between China and England broke off. When I visited Israel a few years ago, the Lebanon war broke out, and when I was in Valencia, Spain, a coup occurred and a rebel general and his troops commandered the city. Moreover, while driving home from a consultation at a center for traumatic brain-injured clients in Toronto, Ontario, on two separate occasions in the exact same spot on the major highway, my car was involved in life-threatening accidents. On one occasion a passing truck dropped a metal drum through my windshield, and more recently, at the same point on the highway my brand-new car was struck by lightning.
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Meichenbaum, D. (1995). Disasters, Stress and Cognition. In: Hobfoll, S.E., de Vries, M.W. (eds) Extreme Stress and Communities: Impact and Intervention. NATO ASI Series, vol 80. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8486-9_2
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