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Air Today . . . Gone Tomorrow Article
Binding Firefighters'
Psychological Wounds
By Robin Finn, New York Times, October
14, 2004
MALACHY P. CORRIGAN'S father was a fireman for 38 years, a member of Engine 292 in
Woodside, Queens, but if he thought it a treacherous job, he never let on to his wife and
children. Firefighting was a manly calling; real men didn't complain or cry. Mr. Corrigan,
a sentimentalist, keeps a model of his father's fire truck near his desk. But the reason
he is more than busy- overwhelmed, really- as director of the New York City Fire
Department's counseling service unit is that his father's heyday is long gone. Real men do
complain, cry and have nightmares, especially the firefighters who survived the World
Trade Center collapse.
Business is booming at Mr. Corrigan's office on Lafayette Street. He kind of wishes it
weren't. There was always a full caseload; he transformed an alcoholism-focused treatment
unit into a full-service clinic after being hired 22 years ago, a brawny redheaded guy
with a brand new master's degree in mental health nursing. But ever since Sept. 11, 2001,
it's as if he's held two jobs.
"The reality of it is that for a lot of firefighters, and for their families, this
has come to be perceived as a riskier occupation, and it's having mental health
consequences, marital consequences, drug and alcohol abuse consequences, you name
it," he says, dropping heavily into a chair.
Add a persistent orange alert to the post-9/11 mental landscape, and an unsettled work
force is all but guaranteed.
With his pessimistic posture and bleary blue eyes, Mr. Corrigan makes an ideal, if
unintentional, advertisement for the demand for Project Liberty, a government-sponsored,
and fiscally endangered, program that provides mental health services for firefighters
affected by 9/11. The program, which he runs, is financed through 2005, but Mr. Corrigan,
who tracks down $6.5 million in noncity money each year for the counseling unit, is
convinced the department needs Project Liberty-caliber counseling through 2008.
His red hair has faded to near-transparency; the same goes for his eyebrows and eyelashes.
His yellow shirt emphasizes a bleached-out spirit, not a sunny disposition. He lost 60
friends who were firefighters at the trade center. He is 53, yet looks a decade older. The
instant-aging effect may be inevitable when one's caseload increases by 400 percent
virtually overnight. The peer-counseling division had one practitioner before Sept. 11;
now it has 40. Saturating firehouses with peer counselors was his idea.
"I don't think we as a society place the same value on emotional injuries being able
to debilitate an individual as we do on physical injury," he says, "but within
the department, we believe we've put a big dent in the myth of 'I'm a tough guy and I
can't be weak emotionally or else the other guys won't accept me back in the firehouse.'
''
Besides coordinating program financing and treatment for more than 3,000 Fire Department
clients, 80 percent of them with issues traceable to the attack, Mr. Corrigan, a seminary
dropout who took up mental health nursing as a default career, is himself undergoing
therapy.
He waited more than a year before realizing that he, too, needed help to cope with
9/11-related nightmares and their daytime- and much scarier- equivalent, intrusive
imaging. (He describes it as a hallucination of the horrors experienced at ground zero.)
The conversation is nearly two hours along before he divulges that smidgen of personal
information. "My job was not to dig through the trade center rubble to find pieces of
civilians and colleagues; my job was to be there with the men who were doing it," he
says quietly, as if speaking in a monotone helps keep bad memories at bay. "Intrusive
imaging wasn't just words on a page. I had it happen to me, too. So I'm still in therapy;
I don't yet have a game plan for when I'll be done."
A GRIMACE is his only response to the political squabble, reported last month in The New
York Times, which may cost Project Liberty an estimated $4.45 million in Federal Emergency
Management Agency money. (The agency's commitment to Project Liberty expires at the end of
this year.) Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democrat, thought she had gotten extra money
through a Senate amendment only to learn that Gov. George E. Pataki, a Republican, planned
to use the money for other programs.
Mr. Corrigan's plans simply include continued counseling for any client who needs it.
"I've faced the same funding realities with Project Liberty ever since 9/11," he
says. "Every 9 months, every 18 months, you have to justify why the money is still
needed. When the federal money is no longer available, I've been assured the city will
assume the burden." But he's taking no chances. He recently secured a $2.78 million
grant from the Department of Justice. "I'm not worried about where the money comes
from; as long as it's legal, I'm interested."
Interested, perhaps, to the exclusion of everything else. He is lucky to have an
understanding wife - a Fire Department nurse. In the fall of 2001, their season tickets to
the New York Giants went unused. When he wasn't at the office, he was at ground zero
ministering to the work crews from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m.
This season's goal, he says, was to attend eight games. "But I've already missed the
first one,'' he says. "Had a memorial service to go to." He spends a lot of time
in churches, an ironic outcome for a Catholic boy who studied for the priesthood but
dropped out just shy of ordination because he saw "too many unhappy priests."
Now he hears, and shares, confessions of a different stripe.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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