Hurricane Takes a Further Toll: Suicides Up in New Orleans

By Adam Nossiter

Mental health professionals say this city appears to be experiencing a sharp increase in suicides in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and interviews and statistics suggest that the rate is now double or more the national and local averages.

At least seven people have killed themselves in the four months since the storm, officials say, here in a city whose population is now no more than 75,000 to 100,000. That compares with a national rate of 11 suicides per 100,000 for all of 2002, and a rate in New Orleans of about nine per 100,000 for all of 2004. There is broad agreement that the problem is likely to get worse.

Stevenson Palfi, 53, a well-known local filmmaker, was apparently the latest to take his own life. Mr. Palfi's house in the Mid-City section had taken eight feet of water, and he was in despair over losing years of files and photographs, a computer - in fact, all the contents of his office.

The aftermath of the storm pushed him "right off the cliff emotionally," said a friend, Mary Katherine Aldin.

"This just hit him so hard," she said. "It was a cumulative devastation to him emotionally."

Mr. Palfi sat down to write a suicide note and a will, then shot himself on the second floor of his Banks Street home in the early hours of Dec. 14, Ms. Aldin said.

The signs of despair are pervasive here: a woman, having returned to see her flooded-out house for the first time, runs screaming down Mirabeau Avenue in the Gentilly neighborhood, where the police find her babbling uncontrollably; in a Bourbon Street nightclub, a man draws a gun and shoots himself in the head, even as dancers sway to the music; from half-ruined houses, the police retrieve homeowners, weeping and distraught; psychiatrists report that previously stable patients are now preoccupied with death and suicide.

Source:  NYTimes (December 26, 2005)

posted 29 December 2005