- LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -
Sexual
activity is up, flying is down and gas mask sales are soaring. People are
gorging themselves on candy and ice cream but also ducking for cover at
the smallest noise. The thought of driving into an underground parking
garage can be chilling.
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- Americans are trying to cope with a new, previously
unthinkable
reality -- war and the prospect of further attacks at home following the
Sept. 11 attacks that left 5,700 people dead or missing and presumed
dead.
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- And it has not been easy.
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- --- "To tell you the truth I was not really
expecting
to return home from PNC Park (baseball stadium) on Friday," said
Richard
Kubia, a television sound technician in Pittsburgh. "I had convinced
myself that there would be a symbolic attack on one of our country's
shining
new ballparks as the last game of the season was played," he
said.
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- The production trucks park in a garage which is under
hundreds of tons of steel and concrete. "I wasn't too happy about
having to be parked indoors from the very beginning of the season, but
that garage takes on a whole other mindset now. It is very easy to get
caught up," Kubia said.
-
- --- Julie, a housewife in Los Angeles, said she thought
about buying gas masks for herself, her husband and her two young sons,
but then decided it would be futile to try to change one's fate under such
circumstances. "Besides, I didn't want to get caught in a predicament
in which the gas mask fit me but not my child or vice versa," she
said.
-
- --- Risa Mandelberg, owner of a card company in Los
Angeles,
said she's been waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares, but
has found herself trying to have fun at several weddings since the
attacks.
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- FEAR OF BIOCHEMICAL ATTACK
-
- "A lot of people are getting married," she
said. "I went to a wedding right after it happened. There were a lot
of tears and the rabbi mentioned the attacks during the ceremony. It was
very sad."
-
- Therapists say people's personalities and prior history
to a great extent determine how they react to trauma, which explains why
some are buying antibiotics fearing a biochemical attack, others are
abandoning
their diets with a vengeance and still others are pretending nothing's
changed at all.
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- "An event of this kind triggers our personal fears
and mobilizes our coping skills. These ways vary, are not limited to one,
and may change over the course of events," said Catherine
Riggs-Bergesen,
a clinical psychologist in New York.
-
- "Your emotional state before the event greatly
determines
how you are coping with it now and in what style," she added.
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- Not surprisingly, many people throughout the country
are experiencing depression, fear and sleeplessness after witnessing on
television or firsthand the horrific attacks on the Pentagon and the World
Trade Center.
-
- What is curious, however, is that several psychologists
have noted an improvement among some patients who had been treated for
depression and anxiety prior to the attacks. But others say that many
people
prone to depression are depressed now by events.
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- FEAR OF FLYING
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- "I got a phone call this week from a patient I had
20 years ago who was afraid of flying," said Jerilyn Ross, president
of the Anxiety Disorders Association. of America and a therapist in
Washington.
-
- "He said he had taken three flights since the
attacks
because he had worked so hard to overcome his fear of flying. He said all
the techniques we used made him less fearful of flying than others right
now," she said.
-
- One explanation is that people with anxiety disorders
or emotional problems suffer as a result of turning inward. But now that
the external environment is less stable, their problems seem less serious,
experts say.
-
- While many Americans are forging ahead with planned
events,
like weddings, business and family trips, many are hunkering down in ways
that are reminiscent of America during past wars.
-
- Indeed, some experts say that many people are turning
to food, shopping, movies and sex as a means of escaping and coping with
fear and sadness.
-
- Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist,
said there are many reasons people have sex during crises.
-
- Times of high anxiety, she said, produce strong emotions
which cause people to fall in love more intensely, decide more often to
get married, and to have more sex. This last activity also serves as a
temporary escape.
-
- "It's blotting out the world and living in a moment
of heightened pleasure as opposed to heightened peril or depression so
you block that out and stop thinking for at least a little while and just
be and enjoy and get down to those basic emotions," Schwartz
said.
-
- Schwartz predicted a "baby boomlet" would
follow
nine months after the attacks but one not nearly as big as the baby boom
that followed the end of World War Two.
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