Charting the Emotions of 9/11 — Minute by Minute

[Michael Hogan]

From TIME.com

By Jeffrey Kluger

Friday, Sep. 03, 2010

There has always been a chilly succinctness to the way we refer to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Even before the page had turned on that shocking day — when the buildings were still smoking and the alarms were still sounding — an unspoken consensus emerged that the event would be labeled simply 9/11. Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination were never known simply as 12/7 or 11/22, but for 9/11, a numerical designation seemed to serve as a thin shield against having to name — and thus feel — the tragedy every time we discussed it.

If we've been parsimonious with what we've called 9/11, we've suffered its impact all the same. One nationwide study in the months following the attacks found that 4% of Americans were suffering from 9/11-related posttraumatic stress disorder, including a whopping 11.2% of New Yorkers. For many office workers who fled the sites and first responders who labored there, those symptoms still linger. Now, a new paper published in the journal Psychological Science has provided a sort of fever chart of how the emotions of Americans as a whole rose and fell in the course of that singular day. The study drew its data from a surprising — and revealing — source: messages sent on text pagers (the closest thing to texting at the time) from people around the country sharing news of the event.

Full story: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2015528,00.html

[Terry Mauro]

"Various beliefs can be implanted in many people after the brain has been sufficiently, disturbed by accidentally or deliberately induced fear, anger, or excitement. Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most common one is temporarily impaired judgement and heightened suggestibility. It's various group manifestations are sometime classed under the heading of "herd instinct" and appear most spectacularly in war time, during severe epidemics and in all periods of common danger which increase anxiety and individual and mass suggestibility."

Dr. William Sargent

Tavistock Institute

[Terry Mauro]

Here is a prime example of this phenomenon. The clean cut Kennedy youth of the early 1960's go mad after being subjected to the repeated shock trauma of the assassination of JFK, RFK and MLK, the Vietnam War and the urban riots.

Kennedy youth gone mad.bmp