Tom Marshall has mostly worked with those recovering from bullet wounds and their families.
He says it's too soon to tell what the long-term mental health impact will be but based on
what he's seen with car accidents or violent crime, about 20 percent could experience problems.
These include anxiety, difficulty managing emotions, and avoiding places, thoughts or
discussions that remind them of the shooting.
And then I guess you have the recurrence of parts of the experience.
So a good example of that would be that somebody may be trying to drive a car, but then something
would happen where they reexperience some extremely traumatic complex of thoughts or
emotions associated with their experience, and they may not be able to continue safely
driving a car.
For some of the survivors, the magnitude of what they went through is so great that they
simply freeze when reminded of the events of that day.
Say you were shot and wounded, and the gunman went away and you began to think that you
may survive and you hear him coming back to finish off the people who had already been
shot.
Then you may, at that point, make peace with your impending death and then maybe, for some
unknown reason, he doesn't finish you off.
And then you're left with this really unusual state for many people, that you have to somehow
work your way through.
Tom Marshall says extended family, many of whom have relocated here from overseas have
helped enormously in distracting victims and the bereaved from the dark hole they would
otherwise find themselves in.
Their Muslim faith has also played a part.
Most of them have a discipline of prayer.
So a number of times each day people take time out from their everyday activities, and
they focus their thoughts.
And they are quite familiar with a range of techniques and experiences that as a psychologist,
I might need to spend quite a lot of time teaching someone who's not had that life experience.
So when we start talking about ways of managing pain, and distraction and occupation and using
imagery, and changing one's thoughts by focusing on particular thoughts, which are all kind
of treatments that we may explore with people, Muslim people can, in my experience, the ones
that I've seen learn to do that very very quickly.
Making sense of what's happened is sometimes more difficult.
It's hard not to be in the way that that futility and stupidity of the actions.
I don't want to go into too much more of that until all the trial is over but a big part
of this has been for the people who've been hurt to try and understand why it happened
and what the motivations were.
He welcomes extra government funding for mental health, including in Christchurch, but says
a shortage of psychologists means the system will continue to be stretched.
It was evident when the government were elected that they were going to have real difficulties
in fulfilling some of the promises and that was pointed out at the time by a number of
senior colleagues.
There are increases and number of people being trained but there'll be huge lead and time
from whenever that might happen to when those people will be in the workforce.
Tom Marshall says the mental health impact of March 15 will be felt for many decades
to come with PTSD sometimes not coming to the surface until much later on.
He worries about the reluctance of some cultures within the Muslim faith to talk about the
mental health and the vulnerability of the many widows left behind who may not be highly
educated or have much English.
Mō te hōtaka o te ata nei, ko Conan Young tēnei.