If you've suspected that sending in the "grief counselors" after every school tragedy might be doing more harm than good, you might have been right:
Talk it out. That's the first advice most victims are given in the wake of trauma. Conventional wisdom would suggest that burying one's emotions after a violent incident — such as a school shooting or terrorist bombing — will only lead to deeper anxiety later on. Yet, while mental health practitioners widely subscribe to this truism, it has rarely been tested outside a laboratory setting — past studies have found a lack of convincing evidence to support the use of psychological debriefing to mitigate trauma — and some experts think the theory doesn't hold up in every situation.
I've never been demonstrative, and I've been told all my life that I needed to "let things out" or "talk them through," that I was doing myself harm by keeping everything all bottled up inside. Now I have my response: Nyah, nyah, nyah.
