I█m a multi-generational louisia Every single memory around water has been traumatic and has shaped the way our family has moved in the city and in the state.

As Louisianans.

We are a resilient people because we're used to systems failing.

It is just mind boggling to watch this happening.

It is not normal for people to have to go through that level of trauma.

Thank you.

I how you can be.

All throughout my childhood, my family talked about how they were on the roof for Hurricane Betsy and Camille, how they lost everything, particularly in the Lower Ninth Ward and the Upper Ninth Ward.

Katrina hit the day before my 16th birthday.

Everything I had was in one suitcase, one small suitcase, and so on.

Knowing that for my birthday, whatever I packed is what I have was the beginning of a new chapter.

Truly, at 16.

Six months after Katrina, I was really frustrated.

I was angry that I was forced to go to school here amongst the devastation.

The city had a smell that I can't describe.

Mold, wet swamp dirt and the sea.

Piles and piles of people.

Stuff and teddy bears and photos and couches lining every single square inch of the city.

And then I go into school, and I'm supposed to act like it's normal.

As Louisianans, we normalize.

What's wrong We're like, oh yeah, it's normal that the power's out for weeks.

It's normal that there's no water.

It's normal that it's hot.

It's normal that there's no where to get gasoline.

But when I go up to Cleveland, where my husband's from, I'm like, oh, I don't have to live like this.

Why are we normalizing these things?

That shouldn't be.

Why aren't we addressing these systemic failures?

Area killing an estimated 1836 people across the Gulf Coast.

So they had to suspend operations and leave those people in their homes.

Eight people are now dead from the flooding in southern Louisiana.

More than 11,000 people have been forced into shelters.

The largest fire in Louisiana state history continues to burn, along with hundreds of fires along the Gulf Coast, forcing evacuations here in Louisiana, where almost the poster child for recurrent climate disasters.

People barely get past one climate disaster before the next one is coming in on its heels.

And for those who are already having struggles, this is enough to push them over the edge.

Trauma has many definitions.

It's not what happens to you.

It's what your body does with what happens to you.

Climate disaster can lead to trauma and PTSD because of the way it evokes responses in the body.

At the heart of PTSD is that the natural disasters actually change the brain, and they just regulate the nervous system.

The lower survival brain takes over, and the thinking part of the brain has a reduced role.

The survival brain ends up, in essence, running the show, but it's happening below conscious awareness, so they have no control over it.

And these changes can continue indefinitely.

The nervous system can go into fight or flight and cause all manner of physical issues.

Headache and muscle tension.

Insomnia and nightmares.

Issues with blood pressure and heart congestion changes.

And all of this can lead to chronic illness over time.

In addition to the physical issues, these changes to the brain and the nervous system can exhibit in ways that have to do with emotions and behavior.

People can be irritable.

They can have anger or rage.

Attention and focus issues.

Memory difficulties.

Impaired decision making.

People can be hypervigilant, looking for danger where there isn't any.

And this leads to incredible anxiety, depression, addiction to cover those difficult feelings and even suicide.

As someone who is working in policy, I've been organizing.

Six months after Katrina hit.

Till now, I think most Louisianans have been living with survival brain for that entire time.

And when you're living on that, you can't see the future.

You can only see your immediate.

Some of the first experiences or memories I have of natural disasters are storytelling.

I'm born and raised in Gretna, Louisiana and have roots all throughout southeast Louisiana.

Generations of family that have been through every type of storm that you can imagine.

I remember all the elders in the family giving us prepared for hurricanes and whatnot.

Being told that there's an ax in the attic and that the levee could bust at any time.

And one side of my family, they were down and coming out of Ireland when that got hit back in the late 1800s.

So I remember hearing about how my great great grandmother wore black head to toe for the rest of her life because she was tied into a tree when she watched a whole house of women wash away.

2016 I helped respond with a huge group of people to the Baton Rouge floods, and that was my first taste of what it's like to drive into an area that's been hit by a disaster of that scale and magnitude.

There's never enough, food and resources to go around when cars have been flooded and people are locked in as everybody is trying to find their way to prepare for Hurricane Ida.

We have I tend to be extremely reactionary.

I send out or email people evacuation plans and hurricane plans.

I'm hyper vigilant, vigilant, but at the same time enact a fight or flight.

On one hand, I'm very prepared.

On the other hand, I'm riddled with anxiety.

I have sweaty palms right now just talking about it.

A foot fight between well, do I leave or do I stay?

Because if I don't stay, then who's going to help?

The survival brain is looking for safety at all costs.

And so a real life example of this is PTSD and non 11 survivors versus PTSD and Katrina survivors.

And with the 9/11 survivors less than 10% of them had PTSD compared to those from Katrina.

With about 33%.

The 9/11 survivors were able to go home to safety as compared to what happened with Katrina.

People lost their homes.

They may have lost a loved one in the flooding with climate disasters like hurricanes.

Even if people are able to evacuate, their homes may be directly in the line of the storm and at risk of not being there when the people are ready to come back to feel safe.

I have one of the strongest hurricanes on record to hit Louisiana.

The state's third major hurricane in just over a year, making landfall.

Because Hurricane Ida was so stressful for people, that's all they can remember.

You just need your immediate needs to be met.

But if you have to live through that over and over again, whether that be category one storms, category five storms or just a rain event on a regular Tuesday, if you have to do that, how can you fix anything?

The strategies to either prevent PTSD or to intervene once it has happened have a similar starting place.

Basically, we want to calm that dysregulated nervous system and help advance safety.

The way to do that is to be able to move the body.

You can do it through breath, through healing, touch, through rhythmic motion like drumming or dancing.

There's singing.

This calms the nervous system daily.

And just like you would exercise a muscle, you're teaching the nervous system to stay regulated or to return to regulation.

Self-compassion is very, very important.

Time in nature is profoundly important.

We also want to work with a higher brain.

We can do a variety of contemplative practices compassion techniques, yoga, journaling, walking, meditation.

I mean, there are any number of things that we already know to do.

Some are going to need more intervention than that.

And the good news is that there are many good evidence based therapies now that support healing from trauma.

When people say people from Louisiana are resilient, you hear that?

And it is frustrating because we don't want to be resilient.

We want to be taken care of.

We want to be given the resources that we deserve.

Truly.

We pay our taxes.

We we are engaged, but yet the systems aren't necessarily built to support us.

We are forced to fix things.

So we're used to fixing the immediate needs, not the systemic needs.

And then other people look at us and say, well, they got what they needed to survive that because we go through this a lot.

We don't need as many resources, not just financial resources, but social resources, quality of life resources than others.

It's really difficult to get help with mental health in the aftermath of any of these disasters.

Time doesn't stand still.

You're expected to just roll right back into business as usual when it comes to trauma and processing.

In my experience, it's that when you really need it, it's overwhelming to try to find a person to talk to.

And the resources are usually not available for people that you know, like me.

I make too much money to qualify for free care.

I make too little money to afford it on my own.

I know that it's not healthy to.

Put yourself last.

Which is usually often what happens with the work and the people that do the work.

Individual practices will go a long way, but we need to be educated about trauma.

Our institutions need to be educated.

Our medical centers, our governmental institutions, our educational centers, our law enforcement institutions.

The ripple effect goes far beyond simply the individual to impact our community.

I mean, for nine out of ten, great pizza, delicious sponsors, mankind is on the list today.

I think for Louisiana, our solutions need to be very different than how we've historically thought about them.

We need to invest more in people that people are mentally and physically well, then they're able to keep going.

I see a lot of Louisianans leaving, not because of the economy, not because of job specific Lee, but because they're tired.

By not investing, we are creating the perfect storm, literally and figuratively, where we have a place that will cease to exist physically, socially, economically, and culturally.

America discounts to South.

And I say that as someone who's lived in New York for many years.

They love southern food.

They love southern music, they love southern culture.

But the people they could leave us or take us.

I have to remind people that the South is diverse, not just ethnically, but socially, culturally.

What would the world look like in Louisiana?

Didn't exist?

Be pretty boring.

It's hard to imagine settling somewhere else.

You know, it's not just the relationships either.

It's the culture.

This is not a culture that exists elsewhere.

We have a beautiful culture.

But it won't matter if we're all traumatized.

It won't matter if we're underwater.

And it definitely will not matter if everybody leaves because they are tired.

Hello, I'm Linda midget.

I'm the executive producer at LPB.

And welcome to this special panel discussion on Ripple Effect.

The film that you just saw.

Joining us in the studio are our senior producers, Ben Johnson and Avery White.

They, produced and directed the film that you just saw.

And we also have with this doctor, Gigi Dunn.

Doctor Dunn is of course, you just saw her in the film.

She is certified in trauma studies and speaks on this topic often.

So thank you so much for being with us.

so I want to start first by congratulating Ben and Avery on doing such a wonderful job with this film.

It's very compelling and, and it's really important.

It's an important topic that I think has not been discussed very much.

I know for me, this is the first time that I had really thought about trauma in association with climate.

I think we've we all feel it, but we don't necessarily verbalize, what's happening to us.

So I think this film is an important step in bringing this topic to the forefront and giving people a chance to learn about this and, take a look at themselves.

Sabine, I want to start with you.

what drew you to this topic?

well, we were given the opportunity to do a national climate story, through PBS.

And, you know, at the time, this was about a year ago.

There's a lot of things going on in Louisiana.

There's a saltwater wedge coming up the Mississippi River threatening our fresh water.

there was wildfires in the swamps outside of New Orleans.

and it just felt like there was, an onslaught of climate events happening.

And as a resident of Louisiana, as a resident New Orleans, I've I've felt, you know, myself get, you know, tensed up when climate events are happening and having something personally affect me and my family.

and so it felt like a, an a good topic to kind of talk about and get, be able to reach out to other people and see how they're feeling about these climate events.

Avery, I know that you live in New Orleans as well.

do you find that you and your community talk about this a lot to the idea of trauma associated with climate change?

Yeah, we have, Ben and I discuss this a lot, but, I am constantly observing my community members in a state of fight or flight around decision making for everything from, minor daily life decisions to big ticket life decisions.

Like, do I raise children in this city?

Do I own a home in this city?

do I move while I'm still in my 30s and I can establish myself more comfortably in a city that's not in a constant state of flux and, a sense of impending doom.

And so, you know, Ben and I are both millennials.

And so for our generation, this is really crunch time to be rooting ourselves in establishing ourselves for our retirement years.

And, everyone in their late 30s is kind of in a sense of anxiety and indecision around, is this where I really want to create a foundation to grow old based on the consistent nature of these emergencies and the consistent failure of our systems to mitigate and, protect us in the middle of these crises.

And it's really extreme.

I always think back to the story that I'm going to ask you guys to share of a couple of years ago when Ben was filming for The Precipice, which is the, award winning documentary that he directed and produced, and, Hurricane Ida hit and Avery, you were in New York.

You guys have to tell the story of just sort of how ludicrous the situation got.

Yeah, I don't want to trigger Ben because it was really anxiety producing, but I actually evacuated to New York City from New Orleans, and, had our hard drive from the film, and, Ida hit Brooklyn as well and flooded the basement apartment.

I was in, with five feet of water and, so everything that I had evacuated with was in floods all the way up in New York.

and so that was a pretty overwhelming experience.

And then I came home to no roof on my home.

no bedroom, no working bathroom, no power for weeks and weeks, and we had to hit the ground running and be functional and go to our jobs and, do just basic life, logistics.

given how absolutely exhausted and overwhelmed everybody was, it was pretty, I had PTSD from that experience.

Yeah.

I was, you know, out of town and asked Avery to take my hard drives and thinking, I'll take the hard drives out of Louisiana so we'll be safe up in New York.

And the storm I was having her evacuate the hard drives from is affecting her.

You know, the hard drives up in New York and it's just one of those times where you realize that this is just this affects everyone and affects the entire country.

And it's, it's stories like that that just keep you on the edge of your at your seat.

Yeah.

I mean, you would think that New York would be far enough away from Louisiana, that you would be safe, but but not so much.

So, Doctor Dunn, I know that I find at the beginning of every hurricane season just this sense of dread, and it's like waiting for the other shoe to drop where you where you think, is this the year where we're going to get another massive hit?

Not if, but is this the year because we know that these hits are going to keep coming.

so there's this idea of anticipatory anxiety.

Can you talk to us about that and explain what that is exactly?

Well, it's exactly as it sounds.

People can see that danger is coming and they anticipate what that's going to feel like, the impact it's going to have.

And in looking forward to the future, it's causing distress even before it has happened.

And that distress can be very much worse.

If this is not the first time that the residents are going through this.

And of course, in Louisiana, it's not our people.

do you think people are aware that this is trauma and anxiety that they are experiencing?

Is this this sort of a new idea?

I'm just it's new to me.

I know that when they when Ben and Avery proposed this topic, it was like, oh, of course that makes sense.

But I had not heard anybody talk about this.

So I'm curious if people are aware of this.

Is this new is an emerging in the field of the study of trauma?

I think it is new and emerging, and it's a wonderful thing that awareness is being raised now about not just trauma and climate disaster, but trauma in general.

But we're just beginning to link it to to climate disaster because of all of the disasters we're having, not just in Louisiana but globally.

Also, the field of the neuroscience of trauma is emerging.

I would say definitely over the last 20 years, the way that trauma is researched is very different.

And there's a lag between when the science comes in and when it actually is pervasive throughout the public awareness and sometimes that lag.

for instance, if you're talking about health care, the lag between science bench to actually implementing things can be almost 20 years.

And so now the trauma research is really coming to the forefront in public awareness.

And we're beginning to see how the changes impact, the population in a variety of different ways, including climate.

And this is our film, of course, focus specifically on Louisiana.

But is this sort of a global phenomenon?

Because we're certainly not the only place in the country experiencing climate change, though I would argument that we're on the forefront of it because of our geographic location.

Yes, it is absolutely a global phenomenon.

And it's not just with climate.

The changes that happen with PTSD are very similar, regardless of the type disaster that got you to that place.

So as we know right now, we've just lived through not just multiple climate disasters, which for us a recurring, but we've had a multi-year pandemic.

We have wars that are raging.

All of this traumatizes the populations, and it's important to raise awareness about it and to begin to talk about it amongst the general population, because there are things that people can do for themselves.

There are some people, it's important to say, who will absolutely need more advanced, support around their trauma and PTSD, but for many, there are daily things that can be done that can help prevent or improve of people who are already having PTSD.

I feel like the first step must be just recognizing that that's even what you're feeling.

So could you tell for our audience, what are what are some signs that you might be experiencing trauma that you're maybe not even aware of?

Yes, I think it's important to recognize that things are in silos at times.

And when you're truly looking at the neuroscience of trauma, those silos need to be broken down.

And we need to recognize it's very complex topic.

And sometimes people are experiencing different symptoms, but they're not connecting it to trauma.

So people can be in fight or flight.

So there can be physical implications from that.

People can be having muscle aches or headaches or insomnia or nightmares.

They can have the beginnings of chronic illness, or there can be emotional things that are associated with fight or flight.

People can have unexplained anger and rage, memory issues, trouble focusing, and constantly fighting.

There's the other side.

Not everybody goes into fight or flight.

Some people go into freeze or collapse, which is a little bit less explored.

The physical signs of that are restricted breathing, just exhaustion that somebody can't overcome.

The emotional side to that can be avoidance behavior.

People can feel overwhelmed and helpless and hopeless.

And of course, there's anxiety and depression and the coping mechanisms of addiction that come from that.

So it sounds like a first step might just being curious about.

That's why acknowledging I feel this way and wondering why, and just being willing to explore that potential link that might be there.

so April and, Jessica, share in the film, about this idea of generations of families that are experiencing trauma in Louisiana, specifically, after Katrina and and even after the floods of 2016.

That's, that's, that's a lot of events been listed off the saltwater intrusion.

And, you know, wildfires, intergenerational trauma.

Could you explain what that is?

What is it?

What does that mean?

Absolutely.

It's it's such an important concept for many reasons.

Trauma changes the brain in the nervous system below conscious awareness.

So until you are aware of what's going on, it's it's hard to change it if it's happening below.

Conscious awareness.

Let's say that there's a mother who's pregnant, who goes through a climate disaster and is traumatized.

All of her stress responses are, ignited.

And one of the stress hormones is cortisol.

Cortisol crosses the placenta, so it gets to the baby.

And in a way, it's nature's wisdom because it's sensitizing the baby's nervous system to a really hyper, hyper stress response.

And so the baby will be born much more reactive to the environment in all the ways that, that will exhibit.

and so as a result of that, now you're starting to get one generation of trauma passed to the other in the discussion of nature and nurture.

This is both because then let's say the baby is 2 or 3.

Now it's a young toddler or young child, and there's another huge climate disaster, or there's the threat of another climate disaster.

The anxiety within the household is felt and taken on by the children.

And so this is patterning once again, a stress response, an anxiety response, and maybe even a trauma response.

That's fascinating.

I had not thought about that being passed down, during the pregnancy process.

I'm curious, Ben and Avery, did you find that it was difficult to, to get people to talk on camera about this?

I mean, this was a very sensitive topic.

How did you deal with that as filmmakers?

Oh, yeah.

You have to approach everyone, you know, differently.

And some people were not willing to, you know, come forward and talk about their experience.

And others like Jessica and April were, you know, very willing.

but, you know, having to go through those interviews as, as, thoughtfully as we could, with intergenerational trauma, there's the nervous system, neurological impacts, but there's also the storytelling that even if, someone hasn't experienced that trauma, the stories from their family and loved ones, almost like these ghost stories have, implemented fear and anxiety and, a sense of unrest in people.

And Apryl and Jessica shared that you know, these stories from their grandmothers really made an impression on them.

And so, Ben and I, as storytellers, we're thinking about, what is memory around trauma?

That's something Jessica spoke about, which is memory loss when these events happen.

and so the importance of gathering these stories and gathering these perspectives and formalizing them, in the discussion around trauma.

So, putting them into an, a historic register of this is how people are feeling around these events in these topics.

Well, it's a very important topic.

so vulnerable one.

And, I'd so much appreciate the work, Ben and Avery, that you did on the film.

And thank you, Doctor Dunn, for all of the time that you've given us, and exploring something that I think in the future we will be discussing more.