Portraits of survival. A twenty-year follow-up of the children of Buffalo Creek

Abstract

This study is a follow-up of the children of Buffalo Creek "hollow" who survived the dam collapse and flood of 1972. It was conceived as a complement to the 1988 NIMH-funded follow-up investigation of the children of Buffalo Creek conducted by the University of Cincinnati Traumatic Stress Study Center. That 1988 study utilized standardized methodology to assess levels of psychopathology present among those who were children at the time of the 1972 flood. Among the original child subjects, results demonstrated that the rates of both posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and levels of other psychopathology had sharply declined as the children moved to adulthood. Several questions remained unanswered: the long-term meaning which the flood had in the survivors' lives and its impact on their adaptation as they progressed through the subsequent stages of emotional development. For these reasons, we, as psychoanalytic investigators who had been members of the original clinical assessment team, planned an interview of child and adolescent survivors as a follow-up to our interviews in 1974 with a particular focus on meaning and adaptation.