Crisis Mode

The images emerging from Uvalde, Texas, were as familiar as they were haunting. Police vehicles crowded around a school entrance. Parents clutching their children, weeping and dazed. Bystanders solemnly laying flowers and teddy bears at a makeshift shrine.

But those scenes following the May 24, 2022, massacre of 19 students and two teachers by a gunman at Robb Elementary School were simply the public face of this terrible event. The moment she learned of the shooting, Clark Psychology Professor Wendy Grolnick knew that, away from the cameras, members of the Uvalde community were staggered by grief, rage, and confusion, and that they needed immediate help from mental health professionals.

As she’d done many times in the past — following the Sandy Hook shooting and the Boston Marathon bombing; after fires, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes — Grolnick reached out to the American Red Cross and volunteered to head down to Uvalde. Soon, she was again at the site of a national tragedy.

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Grolnick first contacted the American Red Cross in 2007 to volunteer her services at disaster sites in her Western Massachusetts community. After years of research and teaching, the longtime Clark professor and specialist in family dynamics looked forward to doing more clinical work and believed she could be of value assisting local people who were left reeling after a life-altering event. “The opportunity to work directly with people one-on-one pulled me right in,” she recalls.

After undergoing Red Cross training, Grolnick joined the organization’s Disaster Mental Health Team and began supporting people at their rawest and most vulnerable moments in the wake of fires, drownings, and accidents — when they may be struggling to make sense of the death of a loved one, the destruction of personal property, or even their own survival.

By 2011, she’d been promoted to lead the Disaster Mental Health Team for the Western Massachusetts region. Two weeks into her new position, a tornado ripped through the city of Springfield and surrounding towns, killing three people and injuring 200. The twister was both calamitous and exceedingly rare for New England. “That was my first experience with a big operation,” she remembers. “I’d never seen anything of that magnitude. These people were very distressed when they showed up at the Red Cross shelter, not only from the devastation, but because they had never experienced a tornado in Springfield — it was unheard of.”

By then, Grolnick had visited enough disaster scenes to appreciate the resilience that people exhibit under the most daunting circumstances. But she also knew that coping with an event that falls outside the realm of typical human experience leaves the survivors questioning whether their response to it is “normal.”

“Even when the immediate danger has passed, people are still terrified and overwhelmed and angry. They may be experiencing all kinds of emotions, and they’re unsure if these emotions are appropriate because they’ve never been in this extreme situation before. We work to help them understand that their reactions are understandable. They’re having a normal reaction to an abnormal situation.”

Crisis intervention at a disaster site is not the same as clinical therapy, which is built around an ongoing relationship between a mental health professional and a client. Grolnick is present to help sustain people in the moment and to share strategies that allow them to move forward — even if that means simply determining what they’ll do the following day. Most important, she works to marshal local mental health services for the support they’ll require over the long term to deal with their personal pain once the disaster team has left.

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Wendy Grolnick’s name appears on a list of licensed mental health professionals who, depending on their availability, are deployed to disasters across the country. As part of the Red Cross’ Disaster Response Operation team, she is typically on-site within 24 to 48 hours of an event, but has also been called as much as a week later to assist.

“In order to do this work, you have to be really honest with yourself that you can go to a mass-casualty event and see person after person who has been affected,” she says. “You need to be sure you’re in the right psychological space and that the resources are in place at home so that you’re able to say, ‘This is the right time for me to go.’”

To help prevent burnout, Red Cross protocols limit how often Grolnick and her colleagues can be deployed to certain kinds of events as well as the number of consecutive days they can be in the field. She typically responds to two or three national-level events in a year.

“What happens on these operations is that the team becomes connected very quickly, and we really look out for one another,” she says. “At Sandy Hook, after one of us would talk to a family, we would all support that person, and then we’d send each other back out. You have to be very mindful of how you’re reacting in that moment.”

The sheer number of disasters that occur in any given year can mean that some events earn far less public attention than others. Six years ago, Grolnick traveled to West Virginia after a series of floods ravaged the Charleston area. Twenty-three people perished as surging waters and mud flows engulfed entire towns and choked off access to homes and businesses.

“Everything was wiped out,” she remembers. “Every store and pharmacy was gone. People came to the shelter with no meds, no phones, no access to family members and friends. All they had were the clothes on their backs. But when I returned from West Virginia and told people what was going on there, the response was, ‘Oh?’ They hadn’t known about it.”

In 2013, Grolnick sped to Boston to assist with the emergency response after learning that two bombs had detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, firing deadly shrapnel into the crowd. A year later, she was stationed at the starting line to talk runners through their fears of entering a race that still wore the scars of the attack.  Some racers were burdened by memories of that day and questioned whether they wanted to compete.

“It was a very interesting experience psychologically that following year,” she says. “I talked with people who had been at the marathon the year before and hadn’t completed the race. Returning to the marathon was more than some of them had bargained for, so I talked them through it and walked them through some exercises to help them relax. I let them know that they did not have to do this if it felt like too much.”

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Supporting the surviving children and their families in the aftermath of a mass-casualty event like Sandy Hook and Uvalde requires special care and consideration. Sometimes it can take the form of restoring a semblance of order to lives upended by unimaginable chaos.

“We want to be sure every child has an opportunity to have counseling,” Grolnick notes. “We tell parents that they will help see their child through this; that despite the terrible thing they’re going through, life will go on, and their kid will be a kid again.”

Working through the emotions in the aftermath of a traumatic event can take many forms. “Some people don’t want to talk about it, and that’s okay. We never push or pressure anyone to talk. Each person’s timetable is different.”

Children may express themselves through drawing or painting. “Sometimes it can be a matter of simply providing paper and a pencil, or some kind of activity, or an opportunity to talk. Kids will find a way to express themselves.”

Grolnick has advocated for more research on the impact of disasters on children and families. During a yearlong fellowship at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Washington, D.C., in 2014–15, she organized a conference that asked hard questions about whether the current approaches to mental health interventions at disasters were helping to curb instances of post-traumatic stress disorder, and where improvements could be made. She later was the lead author of an article published in American Psychologist that argued for a more robust database of relevant research funded through the National Institutes of Health.

When she was interviewed for this piece, Grolnick had been in Uvalde only weeks earlier and had gone through a necessary period of decompression.

“Sometimes coming home is the most difficult part,” she acknowledges. “You feel so much for the people you’ve worked with, whom you’ve had to leave behind as you return to your own life. And when you get back, you really can’t explain what it was like.”

Red Cross procedures mandated that Grolnick wouldn’t be requested to assist at the site of a major crisis in the immediate future. But eventually, inevitably, that call will come. And when it does, she will gladly return to the front line.

“I’m with people at the worst times in their lives,” she says, “and I’m honored that they allow me to be there.”