Sept. 11 Revealed Psychologys Limits, Review Finds

The New York Times:

The mental fallout from the Sept. 11 attacks has taught psychologists far more about their field’s limitations than about their potential to shape and predict behavior, a wide-ranging review has found.

The report, a collection of articles due to be published next month in a special issue of the journal American Psychologist, relates a succession of humbling missteps after the attacks.

Experts greatly overestimated the number of people in New York who would suffer lasting emotional distress. Therapists rushed in to soothe victims using methods that later proved to be harmful to some.

And they fell to arguing over whether watching an event on television could produce the same kind of traumatic reaction as actually being there.

These and other stumbles have changed the way mental health workers respond to traumatic events, said Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who oversaw the special issue along with editors at the journal.

“You have to understand,” she said, “that before 9/11 we didn’t have any good way to estimate the response to something like this other than — well, estimates” based on earthquakes and other trauma.

Read the whole story: The New York Times