Shocks To The System Mean Bundles Of Nerves

Since the Canterbury quakes, mentalhealth services have struggled to cope.

Three-year-old Luke had a plan. With a small spade in hand, he would dig a hole in the preschool sandpit big enough, he told his mother, Kathryn, to bury the earthquake. A sweet strategy doomed to failure. As the aftershocks rolled through quake-hit Canterbury and as other children exhibited signs of stress, Luke showed increasing symptoms of anxiety: nightmares, persistent bedwetting, fear of loud noises, clinginess when starting school.

“He held himself together at school, but at home his behaviour was horrendous,” recalls Kathryn. “He was very anxious. He just didn’t seem happy and he didn’t seem to be doing a lot of learning.”

On a family trip to the Air Force Museum of New Zealand at Wigram, the unexpected audio of World War II bombers triggered an extreme reaction.

“He screamed and screamed. He was yelling at everybody to get out of the building – he was just beside himself.”

When Luke started at Mairehau Primary School five years ago, he was one of a cohort of Canterbury children whose limited experience of the world was dominated by the earthquakes and their aftermath. Now, new research by Kathleen Liberty at the University of Canterbury School of Health Sciences is showing that as many as one in five Christchurch primary school children born between 2007 and 2010 have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.