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Collateral trauma [ Back to Trauma and Recovery ]A teacher heard the stories of parents. A mother told her “ All she could see was pieces of animals all over her yards and the smell was horrendous”. Her daughters’ partners both found work on carcass disposal and they too told their stories: One was handed a big long sharp piece of metal and told to run through a cattle shed and stab each one in the stomach as he went. […] he started having nightmares. (Community interview 2002)
A sole trader located in a marginal area told how he was affected by a cull next to his work premises: MAFF came and knocked on the door […] they sort of asked a few questions and I explained that I live on a farm 10 miles away and they let me know that I couldn’t return home there and weren’t really able to offer alternatives…I had I don’t know, £50 in my pocket and the clothes I was stood up in and nowhere to go basically, the first 2 nights the Saturday and Sunday nights, I slept in the car I found a lay-by away from, far away from here, I just sort of driving aimlessly keeping warm most of the time […] I tried a few helplines that MAFF had handed me and the […] conversation with a lot of them was ‘I’m sorry it’s a sort of unusual circumstances, there’s nothing we can do to help you’. … the last one, […] suggested I get in touch with the local authority which I did on the Monday morning and they housed me in a guest house […] I was there for 2 weeks, that two week period was a nightmare. […] …you almost hit a point where you’re almost delirious and nothing matters. You don’t care, nothing matters in the world and that was a comfort, that feeling was a comfort. You just switched off. And to a point I am still fairly well switched off. (Small business, interview 2002)
He later developed symptoms:When I’m lying in bed I get palpitations, […] you’re thinking the thoughts of the day, thoughts for tomorrow, what’s going to happen next, am I still going to be in business, what if I don’t, what am I going to do next? […] and then the panic attacks set in you can’t ……. I remember first time I saw the doctor […] he said, ‘look there’s lots of classic signs of anxiety and panic attacks, I’m going to prescribe you some more anti-depressants’. (Recorded diary 2002)
The way that many families were incarcerated for months, and the clean/dirty regime imposed on workers and many other rural citizens, also weakened the ability of communities to "pull together". But many accounts of traumatic stress are accompanied by accounts of how individuals found a way to contextualise this, or gain strength from the knowledge that many others locally were experiencing similar horrors. For example, an Environment Agency worker says: …any shared experience [...] you can only appreciate it through having experienced something similar… And I think for a long time I was looking for that kind of support. (Frontline worker, Interview, 2002 [ Back to Trauma and Recovery ]
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