Kansas City News Blog

Dr. Richard Gist

​This week's feature story, "Stop Hugging Us," looks at how research from the nearly 30-year-old Hyatt collapse is affecting treatment of post-traumatic stress treatment today. Turns out, it might be best to leave people alone, instead of making them talk about their feelings.

Like any good research, there was more than one test case, and this time that second group of subjects came from a plane crash in Sioux City, Iowa.

United Airlines flight 232 went down on July 19, 1981, en route to Chicago from Denver. A failure of the plane's No. 2 engine resulted in further breakdown of the plane's hydraulic systems. The plane broke up during emergency landing on a Sioux City runway, killing 110 of the 285 passengers.

For research purposes, the similarity of the disasters were helpful. Almost the exact same number of people had been killed -- though in case their backgrounds were more divergent than the metro residents killed in the Hyatt.

Richard Gist, a Kansas City researcher who'd studied the response to the Hyatt disaster, used the similarities to further examine stress reactions among emergency responders.

"We had a large population exposed to the same type of sudden event at the same time on the same type of day," Gist says. "We never get that. So there was an opportunity to track a large sample, not just from the Hyatt, but in this case as well. And in this case, like the Hyatt, everyone was in it together. It was a real community response."

At the time, he was fairly certain that the popular method of debriefing trauma victims was unhelpful, but little more.

"We expected the data to show briefing was inert. Maybe it made people feel better to talk about it, but it probably didn't do them much good," Gist says. "What did come up that surprised us was the inverse effect that people who invested their time in this experience. They weren't doing so well."

Not only was there no demonstrable effect on the subsequent recovery of firefighters who went through the rescue operation, but people left to recover in their own way were recovering better and faster than those who avoided debriefing.

There was also no evidence showing that those who went through psychological debriefing were guarded against developing PTSD symptoms later on. The firefighters who found the most effective treatments were the ones who went outside of the services provided by their employers. 

Despite the findings, it would be almost another 15 years before the studies received much national attention, and debriefing methods continue to be used as standard procedure for first responders in many states.