Filtering Reality

It was Meghann Gill’s first week at work. She arrived at the small money management research firm in downtown Manhattan dressed in a green skirt and black, short-sleeved dress shirt. While her bosses sped through their orientation spiel, the first plane slammed into the World Trade Center, shattering an entire country’s sense of security.

Gill’s office sat just one block away from the towers and afforded an unwanted, up-close view of the attack.  

“I’d say for the first six months I thought about it every day,” says the now 27-year-old. For almost one year after the attacks, Gill says she stopped in her tracks and prepared to run for cover anytime a plane flew overhead. She says of the first few times she flew after 9/11, “I assessed everyone on the plane, and then looked at my seatbelt to see if I could make a weapon out of it.”

And then, there were the nightmares. “I had a lot of dreams about being in crashing planes. My plane always crashed,” she says. “I’d also dream about Mohammed Atta, one of the terrorists. I’d dream he was outside my window, waiting for me.”  

To try and right her emotionally wrecked self, Gill says she sought the help of a therapist and even kept a knife by her bedside for security. Many in the mental health community would have pegged the young property manager as destined for severe psychological trauma.

In the aftermath of 9/11, newspaper headlines warned of post traumatic stress disorder, and the mental health community arrived in full force, ready to pick up the pieces of a torn national psyche. FEMA granted the state of New York $154.9 million “to relieve mental health problems caused or aggravated by the World Trade Center attack,” according to the organization’s Web site. Everyone stood on tiptoe, breath held, expecting to see the darkest corners of massive, community-wide mental illness.

A month after the attack, Gill was back at work—in the same office she had once fled from in horror, the one that was bordered by a deep, gaping hole in the ground and still smelled of jet engine fuel. Six months after the attack, her nightmares stopped, and the knot in her stomach began to unfold. Gill’s miracle remedy? “I’d try really hard not to think about it, and every time the subject came up, I’d just ignore it.” In her recovery, Gill was not alone.

The great rebound of the American spirit and the American psyche after 9/11 caught many mental health experts by surprise.

But not Carl C. Bell. The professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago will tell you, flat out, that trauma can be a surprisingly good thing for a person to endure.

“Trauma and stress is a double-edged sword, it can make you or break you,” says Bell. “The general rule—and what we saw after 9/11—is that people are more resistant and resilient when they are vulnerable.

"This is because something like 9/11 prepares people—at least mentally prepares them—for the worst that could happen.”

The exception to the rule, then, is when trauma “breaks” those who’ve experienced it. Mental health experts have performed studies suggesting that people who suffered from pre-existing mental health problems before the attack—problems like alcoholism, drug addiction and depression—struggled more severely with these issues in the wake of 9/11.

People like Gill, who today says she feels more “fearless” having lived through 9/11, were forced to confront what Bell deems humankind’s greatest psychological challenge: death. And, just like Gill, many survivors licked their wounds and healed their psyches by stubbornly ignoring this threat.

“We’ve always been unique in being able to have the brain power to extrapolate future outcomes, one of which is death, and that messes everybody up on some level and the best thing to do is deny vulnerability,” says Bell.

“And it’s the same way with terrorism.”