Recovery from Psychological Distress among Low-income African American Mothers

Survivors of Hurricane Katrina have struggled for years with poor mental health, a study of low-income mothers in the New Orleans area titled Five years later: Recovery from post traumatic stress and psychological distress among low-income mothers affected by Hurricane Katrina, finds. Launched in 2003, the project began as a study of low-income adults enrolled in community colleges around the country, including three in New Orleans. After Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, researchers decided to continue to track the New Orleans-based participants. The sample includes 532 low-income mothers, most of them African American and whose average age was 26, spread across twenty-three states; participants were interviewed eleven months and nearly five years after the storm.

The study found that even after four years, roughly a third of participants still exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress, while 30 percent exhibited psychological distress. Though levels for both conditions were down from the first follow-up eleven months after the storm, they had not fallen back to pre-hurricane levels.

"On average, people were not back to baseline mental health and they were showing pretty high levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms. There aren't many studies that trace people for this long, but the very few that there are suggest faster recovery than what we're finding here," said Christina Paxson, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton and lead author on the study. "I think the lesson for treatment of mental health conditions is don't think it's over after a year. It isn't." Due to the makeup of the sample, Paxson cautioned that the study's results cannot be assumed to apply to the population as a whole, but they shed light on natural disasters' effects on a particularly vulnerable group.

The surveys helped rate the women on two signs of poor mental health: psychological distress and post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Researchers measured psychological distress using a series of questions (also in the initial questionnaire) typically used to screen for anxiety and mood disorders, asking about feelings such as sadness, hopelessness and nervousness experienced over the last 30 days. They measured PTSS using a test used to identify individuals at a high risk of meeting the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder; for example, the women in the study were asked how often they thought about the hurricane in the last seven days and whether they had thoughts about the storm that they could not suppress.  

The researchers found that even after four years, about 33 percent of the participants still had PTSS, and 30 percent had psychological distress. Though levels for both conditions had declined from the first follow-up 11 months after the hurricane, they were not back to pre-hurricane levels.

Read more on the Foundation Center website. Read the Princeton University press release. Read the abstract of the study.

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