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 She struggled with her mental health for a decade before seeking
professional help. There were dark days and years including intense
trauma after the 9/11 attacks. Those struck more than two years
after she barricaded herself in a Columbine classroom with 59 other
students in 1999.
Martin, 39, heard about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks over the radio
while driving to work. She has blacked out most of what happened
next. She only remembers her coworkers at a restaurant asking why
she was hiding behind an ice machine.
Survivors of mass shootings like Martin, family members of those who
died in those attacks and psychologists agree that people who have
experienced violence like the recent killings in Boulder and Atlanta
need the care of mental health professionals, not just in the
immediate aftermath but for years or decades afterward.
The United States lacks that effective and ongoing care. Survivors
of mass shootings have stepped in themselves to fill gaps in a
system that is a patchwork of local resources not designed to
provide sustained response.
"All the help in the world is there for the shooting survivors right
after the event," Martin said. "But society quickly forgets and
moves on. The survivors and their families cannot forget, ever."
Thirteen years after Columbine, a gunman opened fire in nearby
Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people in a movie theater.
A few days after that shooting, Martin received a text from a fellow
Columbine survivor, Jen Hammer, asking if she wanted to form a
support group for those who survived the shooting. She agreed
immediately.
"We wanted to offer something that we didn't have access to in 1999
- peer support," Martin said.
In forming their Rebels Project, Martin and several other Columbine
survivors had to confront lingering demons.
"We learned that 13 years later we were still struggling - there was
a whole group of us who were still a mess," she said.
FILLING THE GAP
Like the Columbine survivors, Shiva Ghaed has found mental health
support to be lacking.
Ghaed started thinking about the missing support shortly after she
survived the 2017 Las Vegas shooting at a packed music festival that
killed 60 people and injured nearly 900.
A San Diego-based clinical psychologist who well before the shooting
specialized in PTSD and trauma disorders, Ghaed escaped the Las
Vegas shooting without physical injury.
The National Center for PTSD has estimated that 28% of people who
have witnessed a mass shooting will suffer from post-traumatic
stress disorder and about one-third acute stress disorder.
Virtually all who do suffer PTSD can recover with the proper
treatment, the course of which can vary widely depending upon the
individual, Ghaed said.
"After I came home following the Las Vegas shooting, I realized,
'Oh, my God, I'm not hearing anything about any mental healthcare
support for those who were there,'" she said.
She immediately formed a weekly support group. Amid the pandemic and
other issues, that group has now disbanded. Ghaed continues to seek
ways to provide support through her Route 91 Therapy website.
Sandy Phillips, whose daughter Jessica Ghawi was among those killed
in the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting, created the Survivors
Empowered group.
A day after Monday's shootings in Boulder, Phillips' group worked
with three trauma therapy organizations to ensure that survivors and
their families would not need to wait for government assistance or
insurance approval to speak with a counselor.
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 "We know that trauma therapy
early on gives a huge difference in the ability
to at least move forward in a healthy manner,"
Phillips said.
Laura Wilson, a clinical psychology professor at
the University of Mary Washington in Virginia,
whose research has focused in part on survivors
of mass shootings, said she is concerned that
the pandemic is overlooked as a complicating
factor.
"Community is a really powerful mechanism for
recovery," Wilson said. "The pandemic has
complicated that because people can't get
together; they can't safely hug someone outside
of their household."
Wilson said the mental health community agrees
that the most efficient therapies are cognitive
processing therapy, which seeks to change
negative beliefs and behaviors, and prolonged
exposure therapy, in which a patient gradually
confronts the cause of anxiety.
Wilson's research has shown that mass shootings
- while representing just about 1% of gun deaths
in the United States in any given year - have an
outsized impact on the public at large.
Those directly involved are most acutely
affected, "but individuals across the country
that don't personally know anybody impacted can
experience a psychological reaction," Wilson
said. "We see people posting on Twitter that
their loved one was just going to buy milk, and
the next thing they knew they were being shot at
or killed, and that can impact anybody
regardless of proximity to the event."
ACTIVIST FAMILIES
Colorado state Representative Tom Sullivan only
recently embraced therapy to cope with the loss
of his son Alex, who was murdered at the Aurora
movie theater in 2012 on his 27th birthday.
Sullivan poured his energies into activism and
politics, pushing for stricter gun laws.
Michael Morisette also channeled grief into
activism after his daughter Kristina was
murdered in the Borderline Bar and Grill
shooting in 2018, when a gunman killed 12 people
in Thousand Oaks, California.
Morisette choked on his sobs as he spoke about
his daughter's death at age 20 and his efforts
to help other trauma victims. He left a retail
sales job to become the California outreach
coordinator for Give an Hour, an organization
that provides no-cost mental health care.
He said family members of mass shooting victims
"need peers who are walking alongside us, who
have been through what we face."
Coni Sanders, whose father Dave was a teacher
and basketball coach at Columbine and the lone
adult killed, said her grief motivated her to
become a therapist who works with violent
offenders in the Denver area. She hopes to
prevent future tragedies.
She said that mental health efforts following
mass shootings focus on the immediate weeks
afterward.
"But for many people that does not fit. I didn't
go to therapy until a few years after, which I
found I couldn't cope by myself anymore," she
said. "It's a tricky journey, and support is
needed at different times for years."
(This story corrects quote in paragraph 6 to
'survivors' from 'victims')
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas, and
Sharon Bernstein in Sacracmento, California;
Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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