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The Health and Social Consequences of the 2001 Foot and Mouth Epidemic in North Cumbria
 
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Collective Trauma

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A major theme emerging from the analysis is that of a shared sense of shock, horror and endurance, characteristic of other disasters. The FMD "year" represented a collective trauma in Cumbria, a term developed by others (Erikson, 1976, 1991, 1994; North & Hong 2000 & Sideris, 2003). We know that a wide range of livelihoods were threatened or destroyed; in farming generations of bloodlines and breeding stock were lost; family relationships were disrupted and damaged and many frontline workers were deeply traumatised by their experiences of working on slaughter or disposal, many farming families were divided for almost 12 months, many children lost months of schooling and relationships with neighbours were severely damaged by the imposition of clean/dirty regimes. Importantly, for some respondents the particular trauma of FMD is inextricably linked with processes of recovery.

In 2002, many respondents were forced to revisit the events of the FMD year through anniversaries of culls, of financial disaster or of their reluctant participation in the mass killing. Respondents write of anniversaries rather as a rite of passage. Painful and distressing images and some degree of’re-living" the events of the past year may be part of the recovery process. For example, a slaughterman speaks of his feelings one year after being involved in the mass culls:

It’s a year since I went away killing. I feel a bit funny with myself today. It was our wedding anniversary on the 10th, but this sticks in my mind more.
(Frontline worker diary, 2002)

A DEFRA worker writes of his relief at signs of renewal:
It was good to see sheep back in the fields and even the first lambs were appearing again. The last lambs I saw last year were being given lethal injections by a vet and we laid them out in rows to spray with disinfectant till they were taken for disposal.
(Frontline worker diary, 2002)

Traumatic stress is often represented as the ‘normal’ reaction of those people exposed to an abnormal disaster event (Yehuda et al1998; Alexander & Wells, 1991). Our definition of trauma has been developed within the context of this particular disaster and related to both the events and the reactions to those events. Trauma was widespread, both acute and chronic, and respondents have reported feelings of shock, depression, including thoughts of suicide; loss of concentration and interest; recurrent thoughts and flashbacks, broken sleep, avoidance of and obsessive attention to details, problems requiring medical intervention, a sense of being misunderstood, and anxiety about the effects on children (e.g. witnessing culls). While such ‘symptoms’ accord with more clinically based definitions of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); we maintain that the experience of trauma in this context (while in many ways exacerbated by the long duration of the epidemic), should not be seen primarily as a disorder.

Situations which may promote severe reactions are classically those where the actor or group cannot flee or fight the horror or terror, i.e. cannot follow the instinct either to escape or confront the threat or danger. Being caught in such situations is believed to place the individual involved at risk of developing PTSD. An example of such a situation from our data involves a farmer who was prevented by movement restrictions from feeding his condemned sheep for three days and having to watch them starve in a field near the house. Many of these sheep were heavy in lamb at the time.1 Although the circumstances were particularly distressing in this case, this was not uncommon among those affected and similar situations have been related to us. Horrific as it was, these events took place within a collective context of distress. Therefore individuals did not necessarily become "ill" and many respondents and others found their own psychological or social resources which offered them some protection against this. As McFarlane (1988, 2000) observes, there does not necessarily appear to be a simple relationship between distress and psychiatric illness; distress need not be translated into psychiatric morbidity (Alexander & Wells, 1991).

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