You've probably heard of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. But what about its counterpart, post-traumatic growth?
The term was coined in the '90s to describe the positive psychological growth that researchers noticed in people who had been through traumatic or highly stressful life events. Psychologists and sociologists conducting long-range studies on survivors of Hurricane Katrina – which hit 20 years ago and remains one of the most devastating natural disasters to hit the U.S. – are continuing to learn more about it.
"In some ways, the stronger your PTSD, the stronger the traumas that you experience, the more growth you report," says Mary Waters, a sociologist at Harvard University who studied a group of Katrina survivors before and after the storm. "So it's definitely tied to going through something which challenges you in a very strong way."
Some of the scientists conducting this research are Katrina survivors themselves. NhuNgoc Pham, a researcher at Tulane University, was a teenager when the storm hit in 2005. In the aftermath of Katrina, she helped her parents find help, fill out relief fund applications, and more. Other Vietnamese-American kids did the same.
"It kind of became this thing where the younger kids in the community who knew how to navigate the computer, who knew how to fill out forms … we did it for our parents, and then we just did it for others in the community," she says.
It's the kind of experience, she adds, that makes you become an adult fast. Years later, as a graduate student at Tulane, Pham analyzed data on more than 300 Katrina survivors and learned that the kind of personal growth she went through was shared. Now, she thinks that research could be applied within the disaster relief field.
So how do you measure post-traumatic growth? Can it co-exist with PTSD? NPR mental health correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee explains what scientists have found so far … and how it could help shape disaster relief efforts in the future.
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This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn. It was edited by Viet Le. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer.
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