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Thursday, October 15, 2020

Active shooter drills may do more harm than good, study shows

Katie Camero
Miami Herald
Originally posted 3 September 20

Here is an except:

The research team discovered that social media posts alone displayed a 42% increase in anxiety and stress from the 90 days before active shooter drills to the 90 days after them. The frequent use of words such as “afraid, struggling and nervous” served as evidence, according to the report.

Signs of depression increased by 39% based on posts that featured the words “therapy, cope, irritability and suicidal” following drill events. Concerns about friends grew by 33%, concerns about social situations rose by 14% and concerns about work soared by 108%, the researchers found.

“I can tell you personally, just as an educator, we were not okay [after drills]. We were in bathrooms crying, shaking, not sleeping for months. The consensus from my friends and peers is that we are not okay,” one anonymous K-12 teacher wrote on social media, according to the report.

Worries over health also jumped by 23% while fears about death rose by 22%. “The analysis revealed words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills came up with jarring frequency, suggesting that drills may have a direct impact on participants’ physical health or, at the very least, made it a persistent topic of concern,” the researchers wrote.

An anonymous parent tweeted, “my kindergartener was stuck in the bathroom, alone, during a drill and spent a year in therapy for extreme anxiety. in a new school even, she still has to use the bathroom in the nurses office because she has ptsd from that event.”