Flight attendants cope with the trauma of fatal disasters
When a Southern Airways DC-9 crashed in rain and hail near New Hope, Ga., in 1977, Flight Attendant Sandy Purl was not among the 70 dead. But she came to wish she had been. Hospitalized and sedated for shock, Purl would leap from her bed each night shouting, "Grab your ankles!" and try to force other patients into the classic precrash body position. A year later, she was still overcome with guilt that she had survived and her passengers died. One recurrent fantasy was that her arms and legs were gone. Says Purl: "I thought maybe if I had no legs or arms, I would be a victim of the crash and that would be O.K. I looked into the mirror one morning and beat it to splinters because I looked so good. My husband was absolutely supportive, but I divorced him. I woke up a year later and thought, 'My God, what have I done?' "
Purl is an example of postcrash syndrome among airline personnel: a deep trauma that combines survivor guilt, depression, rage and an array of physical symptoms ranging from digestive problems and hypertension to sleeplessness and heart ailments. Some survivors develop phobias or panic when they hear sounds that remind them of the crash, and many are so worn out by the continuing anguish that they say they are simply too tired to make even minor decisions about their lives. Says Psychiatric Sociologist Margaret Barbeau of Glendale, Calif.: "You can walk away from an accident without physical injury, but the emotional injury may be even worse. You can't X-ray it, but the injuries are real."
Barbeau devotes much of her practice to treating airline personnel and families of the dead after fatal plane crashes. Hired by the Association of Flight Attendants, she conducts group sessions and keeps a phone line open night and day for troubled survivors. Reason: the victim's obsessive need to talk about the ordeal is part of the healing process. Says Barbeau: "The unburdening must go on, over and over again."
The first reaction of the survivor, says Barbeau, is "psychic numbing," a defense mechanism that keeps him or her functioning. Then the full horror of the crash pokes through, fades again, and gradually comes to overwhelm the victim. Like many flight attendants, Arlene Feroe, who survived an Alaska Airlines accident, ran around the hospital for days apologizing to injured passengers. Another attendant drove his automobile into a tree during a hallucination; he "saw" a colleague who died in a plane crash sitting beside him in the car.
Barbeau's aim is to convert guilt and depression into rage and tears—to get the emotion out so that healing may begin.