| No Images? Click here   This week, Anna Almendrala and Erin Schumaker told the stories of mass shooting survivors — including Sherrie Lawson, who endured the 2013 Navy Yard shooting in Washington, D.C. They found that many survivors need mental health care, but can't afford it. And the people who are psychologically damaged by such attacks aren't always treated with the same compassion as those who are physically injured.We asked Anna and Erin about their investigation.How did this story come about? Whose idea was it?Anna Almendrala: After the Las Vegas shooting, our editor Meredith Melnick wrote to Erin and me to suggest a piece on what happens to people who live through mass shootings. Erin and I decided to partner up on it, looked into what had already been done in that vein (including Mother Jones’ portraits of gunshot victims and HuffPost Highline’s What Bullets Do To Bodies), and realized that there hadn’t really been a deep dive into the psychological consequences of surviving a mass shooting.Erin Schumaker: After interviewing a few survivors, Anna and I decided to narrow the story to focus on the financial and social costs of trauma among the growing population of survivors.What was the biggest challenge in reporting, writing or editing this story?AA: When you donate money to the victims of a mass shooting, especially if that money is going to a large pool, you often don’t think about how that money gets to the person who needs it, and how people decide who needs it most. It was fascinating to find all the different organizations, law firms and local committees who play a role in both collecting the money and deciding which victims get a portion of these donated funds.The toughest challenge for us was pinning down all the financial details about how survivors got financial help for the care they need. Often times, the survivors themselves confessed that they didn’t exactly understand how their bills got paid, or how their counseling was free. That meant more reporting for us. I wish we could have highlighted every single way individuals, organizations, businesses and government agencies stepped up for our sources and went above and beyond to provide for their needs after a tragedy.I was impressed, for example, at how Red Robin’s giving fund helped sustain [2012 Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting survivor] Chelsea Sobolik for months while she couldn’t report to work. Or how Aurora Mental Health Center wanted to offer counseling care for mass shooting victims with as few barriers as possible. That means their services are free for the Aurora victims, while the mental health center takes responsibility for billing health insurance, victim’s compensation funds and applying for grants and community charity to accomplish it.Yet in spite of all the amazing ways different parts of a local community can pull together to help people in need, it still isn’t enough to cover all the costs of recovery, which takes years and was described to us as “life-long.”ES: Who is responsible for the cost of mass shootings? That’s the crux of the question we were trying to answer. Anna and I were frustrated by being unable to pinpoint a policy solution — even an ambitious one — for better compensating psychological victims. For the most part, charities favor physically injured victims and laws shield gun manufacturers from being sued. Even if a tax on firearm sales were passed in liberal states like California or New York, it would be unlikely to pass in Texas, where state victim compensation laws are less generous and where survivors of mass shootings arguably need more support.I still want a better answer to that question.What surprised you?ES: I was fascinated to learn that there's a network of survivors from Aurora, Columbine, Tucson and other mass shootings who regularly communicate and support one another. As one of the survivors from the 2011 Tucson shooting told me, although surviving a mass shooting means being part of a club that no one wants to be in, only other people who’ve had that horrifying experience have an inkling of what it's like to process.AA: I was surprised at how much of a financial toll the mass shootings took on survivors. I'm not just talking about medical bills. I'm talking about the wages, education and productivity survivors lost as they quit jobs or dropped out of college to recover from what happened to them. Researchers haven't yet tried to quantify how much mass shootings cost the nation in terms of lost productivity and earning power among survivors.Did you learn anything that could help other reporters and writers?AA: This didn’t make it into the piece, and one day I’d like to explore this issue further. But almost all of the survivors I spoke to had serious complaints about their interactions with media in the days and weeks following the shooting. They spoke about feeling exploited, feeling taken advantage of while in a vulnerable state and then feeling dismayed when media outlets got details wrong or misrepresented them somehow.I felt sad for their bad experiences with media and resolved to treat them with extra dignity, respect and care — just as any HuffPost reporter would do for their subjects. But in doing research for the piece, I came across a summary of disaster psychology that explained that in the 1980s, experts used to encourage victims to talk about their traumatic experiences with someone immediately after the event (within 48 hours) to help them process what had happened. However, this stopped when researchers discovered that not only does this conversation NOT help them heal, but it actually strengthens their memories of the event and interferes with the natural recovery process.It struck me that perhaps people who are hounded into giving interviews about what happened at the shooting, either on the scene or fleeing from the scene, may be doing something similar in recounting their experiences to a news crew. I think the media’s impact on trauma victims, especially after high-profile incidents like mass shootings, should be explored more by researchers and journalists alike.What do readers need to take away from this piece?ES: Even though Americans are incredibly generous after mass shootings (we donated more than 11.5 million after the Las Vegas massacre, for example) that dollar amount is tiny when you imagine dividing it up among the 22,000 music festival attendees who could potentially be traumatized by the shooting. The state government safety nets for survivors who aren't physically injured are limited, and it's not possible for donations and charity to sufficiently address the psychological fallout after these events. On top of that, the laws we have in place make it very difficult to sue gun manufacturers after mass shootings. Unless we find the political will to pass laws to stem gun violence or decide to better support mass shooting survivors, victims will continue to absorb the financial burden of these repeated tragedies.The survivors Anna and Erin interviewed have remarkable stories. Want to read them? Click the big green button.Love, |
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