Psychiatric Disorders Among Survivors of the Oklahoma City Bombing

Abstract

Disasters offer unique opportunities to study mental health effects of traumatic events in unselected populations. Because most disasters strike randomly, studies of disasters circumvent the limitations of research on trauma to individuals in the community, where risk for traumatic events is confounded with vulnerability to psychopathology.¹ The extreme magnitude and intensity of the Oklahoma City, Okla, bombing made it a particularly significant subject for the study of mental health effects of trauma because of the profound effects anticipated among its survivors, including persons with no predisaster psychiatric history.^2-6