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People who do not talk about their feelings after a traumatic event are no more likely to have problems down the road than those who do express them, new research shows. In fact, they may be better off.
"If someone doesn't want to talk about it, that can be perfectly fine," Dr Mark D. Seery of the University of Buffalo, The State University of New York, one of the study's authors, told Reuters Health.
While the conventional wisdom has been that it's healthier for people to talk about how they feel in the aftermath of trauma, Seery noted, there is little scientific evidence that this is actually true.
To investigate whether a person talked about their traumatic experience affected their subsequent mental and physical health, Seery and his colleagues looked at data from an continuing Web-based survey panel including about 36,000 people. All had agreed to respond to a few short surveys each month.
9/11 survey
On September 11, 2001, the company running the survey sent the following e-mail to the panellists: "If you would like, please share your thoughts on the shocking events of today."
Out of 2,138 people who had opened the e-mail immediately after September 11, there were 1,559 who wrote a response. Receiving the e-mail is a "reasonable proxy" for being approached by a counsellor immediately after a traumatic event, the researchers say.
Individuals who responded to the e-mail were significantly more likely than those who didn't to have post-traumatic stress symptoms one and two years after the attacks, the researchers found. The longer a person's response, the worse their physical and mental health. Specifically, people who wrote longer e-mails had higher levels of generalised distress and more physician-diagnosed health problems one and two years later.
Two weeks after September 11, the responders reported doing more "venting" and using more strategies to cope with the tragedy, suggesting that they were more distressed by the attacks than those who did not respond, Seery said.
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