Nearly two years ago, a day after paying a visit to the hurricane-devastated Gulf Coast, President Bush stood in the Rose Garden of the White House and paid lip service to the needs and suffering of the survivors:

I know that those of you who have been hit hard by Katrina are suffering. Many are angry and desperate for help. The tasks before us are enormous, but so is the heart of America. In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need. And the federal government will do its part. Where our response is not working, we’ll make it right. Where our response is working, we will duplicate it. We have a responsibility to our brothers and sisters all along the Gulf Coast, and we will not rest until we get this right and the job is done. [link]

The job is most certainly not done, and the suffering of far too many survivors lingers still, as the following report from USA Today highlights:

Katrina victims struggle mentally

Many Gulf Coast residents still feel the wallop of Hurricane Katrina nearly two years later.

Mental illness is double the pre-storm levels, rising numbers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and there is a surge in adults who say they’re thinking of suicide.

A government survey released Wednesday to USA TODAY shows no improvement in mental health from a year ago.

About 14% have symptoms of severe mental illness. An additional 20% have mild to moderate mental illness, says Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School, who led the study.

The big surprise: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which typically goes away in a year for most disaster survivors, has increased: 21% have the symptoms vs. 16% in 2006. Common symptoms include the inability to stop thinking about the hurricane, nightmares and emotional numbness.

“We’re getting delayed-onset PTSD, and we’re not getting any evidence of recovery,” Kessler says. His team surveyed 800 Katrina survivors in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Gulf Coast mental illness rates are much higher than typical after natural disasters, says psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, a pioneering PTSD researcher and director of The Trauma Center in Boston.

“They’re expected numbers for refugee camps, for people who have lost their communities, their sense of direction, whose core issue is being uprooted,” he says.

A spark of hope in last year’s survey was that only 3% were considering suicide, fewer than before Katrina. But 6% now are suicidal, 8% in parishes in the New Orleans area. [full text]