The pressures of living in general – finding work, balancing budgets, fear of urban crime and violence and the like – take their inevitable toll over time. In that context, the passage of Hurricane Ivan, which quite literally terrorised entire communities across the island in one night, would seem manageable, right? Not necessarily so, say the experts.

Ivan’s terror may induce what is known as Post-Traumatic Stress disorder, a psychotic disorder that can occur in the days or weeks following a life-threatening event or experience, according to mental health professionals who spoke with the Sunday Observer. This could manifest both at the individual and community level.

The people of Portland Cottage, Clarendon, for instance, have gone through hell. Before the passage of Ivan, few people knew even that the district existed, with some people publicly suggesting it was in the eastern parish of Portland.

Before Ivan, Portland Cottage was a lively place, filled with the sounds of life – people coming from and going to the sea, children playing – the regular sounds of normal seaside living, residents say. Nowadays it is eerily quiet, although everyone – old and young alike – is somewhere in the district, unusual for a fishing village.

Since Ivan, there’s been no school, hardly any fishing and very little of anything else. People who would have otherwise been repairing nets, fishing, selling fish or raising domestic animals now just sit and wait, though most aren’t sure what they’re waiting for.

In Portland Cottage, where many of the homes were built on land below sea-level, Ivan’s vicious 145 mph winds whipped up huge waves that virtually covered the village, leaving eight people dead and a trail of almost uniform devastation. The water is now gone, but the terror of that night lingers, hanging over the village like a pallid cloud.

Two weeks after the event, the entire community seems shell-shocked. Most people lost everything to Ivan, but while some people have started repairing or rebuilding their homes, others just sit, as if they still can’t believe what has happened.

“I’m very stressed out. It’s very hard, yuh know,” says Dawn Williamson, a resident of the community. She’s not crying, but everything about Williamson – the slumped posture, the despondent, vacant stare into nowhere and the slow, heavy speech – all announce her depressive state of being. As she talks about the night Hurricane Ivan washed through the village, one can hear the tears in her voice.

From the verandah of her powder-blue board house in Portland Cottage, Williamson can look out across the salt ponds, through the macka bushes to the places where the bodies of her mother and eight year-old son were found, after the storm passed and the waters that immersed the village receded.

On the night of the storm, Williamson chose to abandon her house to stay with her mother, who lived further inland. She and her son, Antwain, were there when the first storm surge came, dousing the village with a heavy wave of seawater. The water started rising. When it reached their chests, they decided to leave that house for higher ground. But as they struggled in the dark, through Ivan’s fierce winds, another huge wave came.

“I lost my mother and my little boy, the water take them way,” Williamson says mournfully, fiddling with a small bit of black cloth tied around her left wrist. She barely escaped with her life.

“From about 8 o’clock that night till bout four the next morning, I hold onto a stick an’ just stay there. I couldn’t open my eyes cause the water salty. I could just hold on while I listen to all kind a noise, zinc a fly, breeze tearing up things and some big, heavy waves coming in.

“It was a terrible, terrible night. That night it take long for day to light,” she adds as she relives the ordeal.

Now, Williamson says, she’s having trouble sleeping at night, only catching a few hours just “before day”. She hasn’t been eating much, and as she stares out across the salt ponds all she can try to do is not think about the terror of Ivan.

In the period immediately after the event, says consultant clinical psychologist Ruth Doorbar, people usually go through a series of phases as they try to cope with the situation at hand.

“Well, the first thing that you do is you cry. Then you feel despondent, and so on, then you start to talk about it. First you go through denial. You say ‘this couldn’t possibly have happened to me’. Then you get angry: ‘why the hell did God let this happen to me?’ Then there is the bargaining period, where you say things like ‘Oh, if only I’d built the house 50 feet from where it was’ or ‘if only I’d taken heed and gone to a shelter’, then after that comes depression,” Doorbar explains.

In most cases, however, says Professor Fred Hickling, head of the University of the West Indies’ Psychiatric Medicine Department, most people find ways to cope with the trauma.

“Generally, all around, people have gone into a kind of post-Ivan depression, where they’ve been immobilised – they look at the devastation and they say, ‘how can I deal with this?’ Most people move into overdrive, and without thinking about it they start cleaning up the yard, sweeping out the water, chopping the fallen trees, that sort of thing. It’s sort of like, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

That sort of reaction to the event is generally positive, Hickling notes, and generally, people work their way through the depression by communicating with others, as their lives begin to go back to normal. In areas like Portland Cottage, however, where the devastation was so widespread and where the losses of the community were so great, Hickling believes that the reaction will be a little more acute.

“I think a lot of those people will go into chronic depression. I do believe there is going to be severe psychological repercussions, not from all of the people, but from some of the people.”

Dawn Williamson may be one of those people, given the trauma she has experienced, and she may be one of those in need of professional help.

“The worst scenario is someone who was all alone during all of this, in the dark and fearful of their life, that’s a horrific kind of experience,” says Doorbar. “If they were with friends and family, then they shared the experience and they can talk about it, and talking really helps.”

While people like Williamson may need more regimented therapy, others in the community probably will be able to get through the period if they have a listening ear in which to relieve some of the pressure.

“The way to deal with depression, of course, is to talk about it,” Dr Doorbar points out.

“Talk about it with your friends, your relatives. Teachers should talk about it with the children, children should get together and each child should have a chance to say what they experienced, how frightened they were, what they lost, and how mommy and daddy are doing and that sort of thing. Then finally, eventually, a couple of months down the line, things will be settled down and we will say, ‘it happened. We hope it never happens again’. We will accept it, which is the final stage,” she adds.

Some people in Portland Cottage are already screaming to have their stories heard.

As the Sunday Observer vehicle nears the village square, travelling along the main road that leads back to Lionel Town, a man waves at the vehicle, frantically signalling it to stop.

“I glad you come. I not beggin’ nutten mum, I want somebody, somebody record my story for the paper,” he says, almost pleading, as the car pulls over.

His name is Wayne Sinclair, a tall, dark-skinned man who did carpentry work in and around the district. Sinclair has lived all his life in Portland Cottage – he was born there, his parents live there, and he even built his house mere steps away from his grandparents’ house. He and his wife have three children, ages 13, nine and three.

On the night of the storm, he says, he and his wife saved their children’s lives and the lives of two elderly neighbours, after which the entire family and the neighbours – nine people in total – spent the night huddled against the howling winds on the roof of a nearby house.

Sinclair points to his furniture, scattered wide and ruined by the raging waters.

“See me what-not over there, and that is the stove,” he says pointing. His house was completely flattened and now he and his family sleep under a tarpaulin stretched over their only remaining possession – a queen- sized bed.

“Well really, we make the children dem sleep on the bed, and me and her (his wife), we just kotch right there on the ground. Dis is where we all sleep, in the open, with nothing. Mosquito a nyam we constantly and there is not a thing we can do. Everything gone.”

For about half-an-hour, Sinclair relates stories about the night of the hurricane, and in the end, he indicates that he will be welcoming any attempt by the Government to relocate some residents.

Prime Minister P J Patterson has given instructions that no rebuilding must take place in the area that was flooded. He announced that Food For the Poor would be given money by the Government to relocate the community.

“Of course me waan move. Me nuh waan deh yah again fi water like that come back! No sah!” Sinclair declares, shaking his head emphatically.

But although people like Sinclair and Williamson may be severely traumatised, Professor Hickling does not expect to see people get the type of depression which would cause them to harm themselves or others.

“Quite paradoxically, usually you do not have things like increased suicide or increased homicide after these events, so I don’t expect those things to happen,” Hickling says. “I think that in another three-month period we’re going to see another set of psychological problems emerge, a kind of chronic depression, and in some cases, people with an existing psychotic condition may have that condition exacerbated.”

Both Hickling and Doorbar agree that some intervention is necessary at this point, since identifying those people who need help is critical at this time.

“The Government should provide some professional counsellors, because sometimes if you just talk to the people who went through the same problems you had, many times it’s just grousing in a sense, but if you have professionals they will show you the light at the end of the tunnel,” says Doorbar.

According to Hickling, Jamaica’s health system is more than capable of handling the post-Ivan fallout, through the extensive network of formal and informal therapists – formal therapists being psychologists and psychiatrists, informal therapists being teachers, pastors, and other elders in the community.

“There is this business of the tough getting going, but there are others that will be chronically depressed and we are going to have to create the referral facilities to pick out these vulnerable people and help them back into strength,” says Hickling, indicating that perhaps the weakest link in the system would be actually identifying and convincing the affected to seek help.

For right now, however, although help in the form of well-needed food and clothing is coming in from the Government and from philanthropists, the mental health needs of the people of Portland Cottage – as is the case for other traumatised communities across the island – are being addressed internally.

“Well, people in the district, they comfort me and encourage me, and I’ve been talking to the Seventh-day Adventist pastor,” says Williamson.

“It still hard though. And every time my mind run on it.” she trails off with a shudder..