PURI: The Fani-wrecked fishermen’s village of Penthakota in Puri presents a stark picture of the destruction that the cyclone unleashed a week back. As the families returned to the place to pick up the pieces for rebuilding their lives, 10-year-old Arna was seen rummaging through the debris of collapsed houses, uprooted trees and garbage piles for firewood to get the stove burning in her house. Bowed down by the stack of wood, the size of her body, the little girl was trudging home when she spotted some volunteers of a disaster management organisation. The next instant, she dropped the haul and fled the scene. No amount of empathetic calls could stop her.
A little distance away, 45-year-old Charulata Sahoo, wife of a street food vendor, sat still with a dazed look on the verandah of her erstwhile house whose roof has been blown away. “She has fallen silent ever since we have come back. Whatever little she speaks lacks coherence. We have suffered heavy losses including our home and this shock has seriously affected her,” said her husband Jatadhari Sahoo.
Fani has not only uprooted the lives and livelihood of people in the Temple Town and around but also left a huge scar in their minds which is visible everywhere. Economical and social consequences notwithstanding, the brute force and the scale of devastation experienced by the people of Puri for the first time in their lives has left a lasting psychological impact on them.
Called post-traumatic stress disorder in clinical parlance, a sizeable chunk of the people in Penthakota, which is home to 800 families, are displaying the telltale symptoms of anxiety, fear and panic reactions. Many are even showing symptoms of severe depression and personality disorder.
A national-level Taekwondo player, 18-year-old Sumitra Pradhan, complained of suffering from chills, body ache and fever in the evenings and attributed it to being possessed by the spirit of her dead mother. “My father has married another woman after the death of my mother. After the cyclone, her spirit has been haunting the slum and has possessed me. She is unhappy,” she said while rubbing her nails eerily.
Head of Psychiatry at MKCGMCH Berhampur, Prof Ajay Kumar Mishra, terms these as the fallout of the severe trauma suffered by the people due to the cyclone. Though all the people from the area were successfully evacuated to safer places or cyclone shelters prior to Fani, on return they found everything about their lives upturned. The shock of losing their houses, belongings, life-long savings and hard-earned assets hit them harder than the cyclone.
“We have experienced this among population of Jagatsinghpur during the Super Cyclone of 1999. For Puri, the disaster of this nature is a first. It has stunned the people,” Prof Mishra said.A sense of insecurity and suspicion has developed within the minds of the victims. The cyclone has uprooted their security covers (shelters) and livelihood. “Most of them will find it difficult to understand where to begin life from, once again! This feeling triggers depression, anxiety and other traumatic manifestations,” said Bhubaneswar-based mental health expert Anuradha Mohapatra.
The experts have called for initiation of mental-health interventions like counselling of the affected populace along with relief and restoration measures. Their fears and anxiety have to be assuaged and they need to feel that they have support.
“As things return to normal, most people will recover in about two weeks but there will be some in whom it will leave a pathological imprint. They need to be identified and supported to ensure that it doesn’t turn a lasting illness,” Prof Mishra stated.