Mental toll on miners
Posted Oct 13, 2010 02:27:08 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The Chilean miners’ psychological experience can be compared to living through war.
So says Dr. Walter Mittelstaedt, Director of the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Mental Health Research.
He says once the 33 miners are all out, they’ll have to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, and each miner will have a unique path to recovery.
That recovery will involve looking back on the worst of the experience when they were truly facing death.
But each miner may also try to avoid looking back, as families and the world’s media ask questions about their ordeal.
Mittelstaedt says recovery will also depend on any pre-existing emotional difficulties with any given miner before the collapse.
He says the worst part of the whole experience would of course be at the beginning, before the miners were discovered.
But once they were discovered, Mittelstaedt says the miners each had to learn patience, and focus on the moment, as opposed to becoming anxious for a rescue that was still weeks away.
Mittelstaedt says the group dynamic in the mine would also have been a challenge, and leaders would have emerged in the group to steer them away from a mood of competitive, individual survival.
Mittelstaedt says the world of academic psychology will want to study the group dynamics of the miners, and their individual recoveries, as a way to possibly help future survivors of similar disasters.
