Nobody in London gives a fuck, except those immediately affected. We've dealt with Irish terrorism since God knows when. Life goes on, believe me. The prevailing emotion yesterday was the determination to carry on regardless.

By my count we had at least three MeFi / MeCha members waiting out the no-news. CIS happens to everybody at one time or another.

Carry on.

I'm sorry to hear that.

According to that, I seem to suffer from CIS at least once a week. Usually on a friday night.

pretty_generic seems to have a point. I'm in London and I'm surprised at how little people seem to care about this. maybe it's true that the IRA attacks really changed the way Londoners perceive danger

Or maybe the blitz, for those who remember.

I wonder if there isn't something about the way the US media (particularly TV) treats disaster as entertainment -- ala Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Does the difference between the Beeb and Fox have something to do with it?

yeah, things get back to normal pretty quickly around here.

maybe it's true that the IRA attacks really changed the way Londoners perceive danger

it's not so much how we perceive danger, i think it's just simple practicality - we have lives to get on with and the odds of us being killed or injured in a terrorist attack have not greatly increased.

Does the difference between the Beeb and Fox have something to do with it?

is that really a fair comparison - are the proportion of viewers the same? in any case the difference in broadcasters here is quite pronounced. itv was shockingly bad as per usual - at one point they just seemed to be pulling casualty numbers out of their arse while the bbc would only report official numbers. good thing too - us brits have this strange mentality that in times of important news we'll only believe something if we've heard it on the beeb.

Perhaps we're just more sensible? No? OK, I'll shut up now.

nah. it'll hit you later, or the next time--this was a very small one, comparatively. Just seeing far more cops all over the subway here makes me nervous when i wasn't before. Of course, it doesn't stop any of us from taking it. : >

i still have nightmares every time there's another attack--madrid, bali, and last night from london.

(but then of course i have nightmares if i see a scary movie, or a gross pic online, or stub my toe that day, etc)

Which is to the point of the unstated assumption I made above: CIS and PTSD are informational diseases. The causative agent is toxic information.

The U.S. has a very bad attitude towards public health issues: AIDS, drug epidemics, floridation, etc. Maybe the same thing goes for informational hygene (for lack of a better term)?

The prevailing medical models in the U.S. are almost entirely based on clinical medicine and give very short shrift to public health models.

There hasn't been any effort to deal with the public health aspects of terrorism, despite all the money thrown at woozey deals like bioweapons detectors, data mining and other physics-based science. Where medical science has been involved, even with the CDC, the underlying theory and doctrine has been almost exclusively clinical -- one patient at a time.

This is also true of the CIS treatment community (which I have worked with.) Hence the controversy about CIS debriefing. If you root around a little, you can find stuff about it. There has been no effort to do things like prepare public health education: Public service announcements with the information on the handout sheet in my second link, for instance.

I tried to get something going around this a couple of years ago (I have been thinking and writing about mass casualty situations since 1996). But it was repeatedly shot down with the argument that "we are already doing that" -- meaning that clinical programs exist widely, particularly since the Columbine incident.

So I continue to think about it and keep ready the means to produce quantities of handouts like the one you've seen.

Twice now I've been able to supply them to people working in the community dealing with the aftermath of a couple of fairly violent and grotesque incidents. The handouts clearly helped some, but I still haven't made much progress in terms of training people in the media to understand the underlying issues or preparing things like PSAs and health education commercials on CIS.

the only info we've gotten is to have a stupid go-bag, and to live our lives and keep shopping.

Nobody in London gives a fuck, except those immediately affected.

Seeing as any given Londoner's chances of dying in a car crash are magnitudes higher than dying in terrorist incident on any given day, perhaps it's just a practical sense of the odds involved.

I talked to a woman the day after the bombings who said darkly that "we were going to be next", as if Vancouver B.C. was high on international terrorist hit lists. Baseless paranoia; you'd be better off panicking when you get drive onto the freeway, but millions of us still do that drive every day anyway.