ABSTRACT

The woman discussed her personal experience with her, how she had missed work on 9/11 because her three-year-old child had come down with the flu. That morning, she had cancelled her carpool with a friend who was now missing. When she saw what had happened on the news, she described feeling totally numb. The entire first day she sat at home, watching the news and making phone calls. The assistant chief of the inpatient unit, who was also the cofounder and vice president of Disaster Psychiatry Outreach (DPO), asked for volunteers to help counsel victims at the World Trade Center after work. He explained that DPO was an organization of psychiatrists whose primary mission was to aid in disaster relief by providing on-site psychotherapeutic and psychopharmacologic services to victims of disasters. The staff expected a huge influx of people seeking psychiatric care and possibly requiring admission.