Page 160 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

On Reentering the Chapel 129

introduced herself and described herself as “the one running the shelter part
of things because I’m unemployed, and have had relevant experience, having
raised 12 children, and I’ve been through some things in life … I understand
these people.” She had been working 7 days a week since the hurricane struck
to try to help run things at the church. She was remarkably calm and focused,
given this history. I asked her for some background on the shelter, some sense of
the scale of the operation. She said that they currently had “about 50” people in
the shelter, but had had as many as 200 two weeks earlier: “Many people left, it’s
been hard to keep track.” She had identified three individuals that she felt were
in need of psychiatric evaluation.
In addition to identifying individuals in need of evaluation, she made a
point of asking us to spend some time with the pastor of the church when he
arrived. He took us on a tour of the chapel and then brought us back into his
office. We spent over an hour with him. It was important that both of us were
there; in a sense it seemed more like we were bearing witness. He asked if we
were psychiatrists, and then when we assured him that we were, he closed the
door and said he had several things to tell us. He spoke slowly and was very
somber. He told us that the main thing he had learned from having more than
50 people living in his chapel was that food and shelter were not actually the
most important things these people needed—it was social services. “When I
heard about the hurricane and the levees breaking … I thought, we must open
our doors to those people and take them in. … I figured we’d have five or six
people for a few days.” He shook his head and there was silence in the room. He
then asked about his own symptoms of sleeplessness, anxiety, and depression
and wanted to know if they were normal or if he should worry. We were able to
reassure him. At the end of our conversation, he looked relaxed and much less
somber; he’d clearly managed to feel supported by our presence.
My colleague told him how glad we were to have been able to spend time
with him and asked him, “Why were you able to talk to us? And you asked if
we were psychiatrists. What was it that mattered about that?” He said that he
felt that he wanted to talk to people from outside his community who he could
trust, who would not judge him or the efforts the chapel had made. He said that
he felt that, as psychiatrists, we “probably know what social problems are and
what it’s like to not have enough to give to people. …”
The second shelter we visited, we arrived around dinnertime. We were wel-
comed in by a crowd of evacuees and parishioners who quickly put together
paper plates with barbecued chicken on them and put them in our hands. The
church seemed like a gymnasium inside, with one area with sleeping bags and
little suitcases arranged next to each other in neat rows, and another area with
long tables and folding chairs. We spoke with the person in charge of the shelter,
a retired tradesman, who was quite energized to see us. “I’m so glad you are here.
We have a fellow here, a very nice fellow, I like him, but he is on medications and
he clearly has some mental disorder. … I’m glad you are here so we can get him
to the kind of place where he can get the care he needs, a hospital or something.
He’s very nice. We have a retired nurse in our parish, she’s over there at that
table helping the old people with medications, but she doesn’t know about men-
tal diseases.” We evaluated him, a fellow with a history of chronic mental illness
who had been alone in his apartment in New Orleans when it had flooded. He