Gelisim News

Saying that one of the most common symptoms is excessive alertness, Elli said: “For example, an anxious individual may experience an intense feeling of panic by a slight noise, a slight shaking of the table while eating, and sometimes even being touched someone nearby. Since the individual in this situation has received a physical threat due to the earthquake, her/his body is still alert and therefore s/he shows excessive sensitivity to external stimuli. Under normal circumstances, we expect these symptoms to disappear after disasters such as earthquakes, but if the symptoms stay, they may indicate a psychiatric disorder we call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

Mentioning that people may start to avoid some places or situations due to anxiety, Clinical Psychologist Ünal Erdem Elli from Istanbul Gelisim University said: “For example, in the earthquake in 1999, since people were caught in earthquake in their beds, most people could not sleep in beds for a long time, and their anxiety was also manifested by problems such as insomnia. Another person may be anxious to enter any building and it starts to cause serious problems in business or in everyday life. Anxiety reactions also require psychological or psychiatric help if the reactions are intense and last long. One of the common reactions is to relive the moment of danger like the moment of earthquake. For example, before the person falls asleep, the moment of earthquake can come back to her/his eye and re-experience the feeling of horror. This is one of the common reactions to trauma.”

Elli, stating that trauma creates a similar psychological process also for children but the symptoms and intensity may be different for them, said: “Children experience the loss of control more intensely because they do not have the adult's mental ability to understand what happens in the outside world. In other words, the feeling of uncertainty becomes more intense since children’s interpretation of the situation is more difficult. Even though children sometimes cannot express their fears, their parents may observe the situation when their children often engage in earthquake themes in their games, often ask questions about the earthquake, and sometimes awaken from their sleep by having nightmares about the earthquake.”
 

Emphasizing that individuals, whether children or adults, should be encouraged to express their anxiety, feelings and fears about earthquakes, Clinical Psychologist Ünal Erdem Elli from Istanbul Gelisim University said: “It may not be possible to normalize the earthquake, the purpose of both families and experts is not ‘to ensure that individuals are not afraid of earthquakes’, this is already not right or possible. Since people's fear and anxiety responding to life-threatening situations such as earthquakes are normal, the approach to people affected by the earthquake should be based on understanding their feelings and explaining the normality of these feelings to individuals.”
 

Ünal Erdem Elli ended his speech as follows:
 

“In other words, although the earthquake cannot be normalized, the emotional reactions to the earthquake can be normalized. to say “there is nothing to fear” a child who says he is afraid of an earthquake or a child who shows it through his games, will not help. Unfortunately, some parents accuse their children of being “cowards” and make it impossible for them to express their feelings. However, studies conducted with earthquake victims after the earthquake show us that the most useful factor in psychological first aid processes is the “normalization of emotions”, that is, when individuals know that the anxiety they experience in the post-earthquake period is normal and they feel comfortable to share this feeling, they are more easily relieved and more comfortable, and the risks of developing a long-term psychiatric disorder are reduced. It can be said that these programs may cause relatively less permanent damage if the earthquake-related programs and the experts who provide psychological support to students in schools educate the families in this direction and create an environment in which they treat the children after the earthquake without mocking, suppressing, trying to adopt a non-judgmental and accepting attitude. Nevertheless, in the case of persistent symptoms, the help of a specialist should be sought.”