The proposed study is a thirteen year followup of survivors of the Buffalo Creek West Virginia dam collapse/flood of 1972. An extensive data base is already available on the 381 adults who were litigants in a lawsuit seeking damages two years after the flood. These data have been reported previously by this research team. The present work proposes to follow up 200 of the previous subjects, 60 new subjects who were not in the lawsuit, and 60 new subjects who live in a neighboring community and were not exposed to the disaster. Data collected will include demographic and diagnostic information, levels of functional impairment, self-reported symptoms, coping strategies, sleep and dream data, life events, and physical/medical data. A conceptual model of how a catastrophic event is processed will be used to guide data analysis. We will examine the extent to which individual survivor experiences are predictive of level and type of long-term psychopathology and pathophysiology, and determine the increase in prediction that can be obtained by knowing information about personal characteristics of the survivor and characteristics of the recovery environment. The comparison groups will help us to determine how much of the overall level of psychopathology found can be attributed to the total disaster experience, and to participation in the lawsuit. The investigators are also targeting the group of young men who were 18-24 at the time of the flood in order to compare them to Vietnam veterans presently being studied. This comparison will be helpful in understanding the nature of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder in survivors of different disasters. The information obtained will be useful in planning mental health services for survivors, in identifying which survivors are at higher risk for long-term psychopathology, and for designing short and long-term treatment interventions.
