Mind Moves: There was a reserve to New Year celebrations. The images of the tsunami, the disaster visited upon thousands of people was a backdrop too potent to be ignored. Celebration felt incongruous, too great a contrast, too callous a comparison for revelry without the thought of another place, a living graveyard, among which people waded trying to rescue the living and identify their dead.
The proximity, the immediacy of media images of disasters even as they occur, brings a new dimension to our psychological experience of these events. This is not delayed reporting of an abstract occurrence in a distant region of the world, as it would have been in former time. This is close up with real-time horror on the faces of people in the seconds before they died: death snatching its victims in its extraordinary, arbitrary and capricious way. This brings an uneasy voyeuristic vision of the marbled misshapen countenances of the dead. This is decomposition alongside a dismantling of our core belief that anyone is ever safe. If so-called paradise could be lost, can security ever be re-gained?
The tsunami and its aftermath raise several issues of psychological import. The first is why we have such need for what may seem like salacious scrutiny of every second of the situation. With what obsession do we follow text and talk, image and media? Why do we do this and what purpose does it serve?
There is a purpose and it is not mere heartless mesmerism. It is the human need to understand what has happened others. For this might have been any one of us - if we had had the money or the time to read the brochures, book the holiday. There but good fortune might any one of us have been.
There is also a species need to hear the stories of survivors, of courage, of miracles: a baby on a rooftop saved. We need to know that disaster can happen but people will survive, that they will be brave, will rescue each other, die for each other and assist with the dead. We lose our helplessness when we know what has happened and how we can help, even if that help is the skim of our plenitude. It is our way of being involved.
The second issue involves understanding the psychological processes in tragedy. The plethora of man-made and natural disasters has produced considerable research into typologies of disaster victims. Researcher Dudasik identified victims according to their proximity, from directly involved 'event victims' to 'contact', 'peripheral' and 'entry' victims, such as rescue and recovery personnel.
Researchers Taylor and Frazer provide another taxonomy of disasters and victim 'levels', from 'primary' victims to those engaged in post-disaster body handling and identification. And we are the so-called 'sixth level' of vicarious victims who watch and witness images of other people suffering through media reports.
But what of the personal post-traumatic experiences of those who were there? For them, it is re-living, re-experiencing the event, the dreams, nightmares, daytime flashbacks, panic, phobic fears and the 'death imprint': the memories and images which can remain post-disaster for up to 30 months. There is an array of post-traumatic somatic symptoms - bodily reactions in fatigue, sleeplessness, gastrointestinal pain, loss of appetite and often use of substances to numb the memories when the initial psychic anaesthesia has worn away.
But most painful of all emotions seems to be 'survivor guilt': simply living when others died. Worse, that staying alive might have been at the expense of another. To witness others perish, to survive because of some serendipitous event or because someone saved you who subsequently died; these are not trivial experiences and they take a long time to accommodate within one's life story.
There is the torrent of memories of the rapidity of those moments, the seconds in which to flee, rescue others, live: seconds of confrontation between the wall of death and fragility of existence that changes perspective on life forever. In the words of Erikson, "death like this does not retreat - it lies out there in its inescapable worst - an advance look at hell".
The third issue is those who suffered loss of family members. This is non-normative grief, a public event surrounding personal loss and the injustice of the conspiracy of circumstances that brought your loved one to that place at that time. Sudden death is always difficult and disaster death has many dimensions.
Finally, there is the issue of our response. Critique is levelled at our emotional effusiveness in disaster as opposed to our humanitarian lethargy before equal emotional suffering in other parts of the world. This may appear to be so, but one of the extraordinary outcomes of inexplicable disaster can be an unexpected focus on the reality of life for others everywhere and acidic awareness of our privileged positions here.
When the horror of this specific disaster has subsided, like the tsunami itself, the aftermath may force us to wade among awareness of many whose very lives are disasters of our making or of global greed. Tsunami does not obstruct our vision of other tragedies; it carries us towards them in a psychological torrent of reawakened compassion.
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview, in Dublin.