-We move now to mental health and lessons learned from 1 October that can be applied in the aftermath of the UNLV shooting.

Here to discuss are Tennille Pereira, Director of the Vegas Strong Resiliency Center, and Stephen Benning, Associate Professor of Psychology at UNLV.

Thank you both for joining us.

And first off, Stephen, you were on campus at the time of this shooting.

What was your experience?

(Stephen Benning) So I received word through the UNLV alerts system that there was a shooter.

We got three messages in pretty quick succession, which had never happened before.

Whenever there was a training drill, we knew ahead of time, and there was plenty of warning it.

And it was usually just one message.

And so I dragged a desk in front of my door and got messages after about, oh, 12:30 or so.

I think that the situation had been resolved and that the police were clearing buildings.

So I waited in the office and was contacting all of the students in our Clinical Psychology department to make sure that they were okay or at least had been able to shelter in place.

Got in touch with all of the first-year students.

Our Associate Director of Clinical Training was taking the second- and third-year students.

I had gotten through two of the fourth-year students when the police came to evacuate me to the Thomas & Mack.

And so I went around looking to provide psychological first aid to people who were there and also greeting some of our students who came through additional evacuation waves, tried to see if they could get belongings, figure out where people were going, and then drove home after it was very clear that Las Vegas had established a great crisis response at the Reunification Center.

-Psychological first aid, I've never heard that.

But you were administering that to other students.

How have you administered it to yourself?

How are you doing?

-Well, just before coming in today, my wife was cleaning off the door of our patio, talking about the little paw prints.

And the day that all of this happened, I got an email from his school saying that there was an incident, a fire drill, which made me really start wondering what that incident was.

And it elicited a sort of overwhelming burst of emotion before coming in.

And it's, it's really easy to shame yourself in that moment and feel like, I shouldn't be feeling this way.

My wife was right there.

She came over to my side as I was weeping and comforted me.

And I still felt, even as a psychologist, even as someone who knows that these kinds of reactions are completely normal, having these associations, these triggers come out, totally normal, totally expectable, not disordered in any way, they are simply reactions to these kinds of traumatic events, I still had this sense of guilt for burdening her and felt like I shouldn't do this.

Fortunately, I have the training to be kind to myself in the, in the acute moment at that stage and say, This is a reaction.

This is totally expected.

And when triggers come up in random ways, I will be experiencing these waves of emotion.

Other people who were even closer will probably have more frequent and stronger emotional responses.

Those are okay.

And those are things that are simply normal reactions to this kind of trauma.

-Tennille, I keep seeing you shake your head.

The Vegas Resiliency Center was formed in response to 1 October.

What has that experience-- what impact has it had on how you've been able to respond this time around and hearing stories like that?

(Tennille Pereira) We had over six years to prepare for the reality of the world that we live in.

You know, the community has changed a lot of things in how we respond to these.

You know, we have a lot more knowledge on how trauma impacts someone and how we respond.

We've tried to do a lot of education with just the general community that, you know, these things are normal to respond in this way.

You know, we were ready to go.

Immediately, we were ready to go.

All the relationships that we built of all these community partners were in place.

Things went much smoother, the reunification stage.

And we have programming in place already.

We know who to call.

We know who's properly trained.

So definitely in a much better place.

It was, you know, a bit too familiar, doing these things again.

And we know the long road of healing that many people are going to have now, the community is going to have.

I do find a sense of comfort in our knowledge and our experience, though.

It's sad that we have mass violence experts, but we do.

-You bring up the long road to recovery that's ahead.

You are part of a study.

You've been the chief person behind a study about 1 October, which sort of established a recovery timeframe for people who were at 1 October and members in the community.

Will you better explain it for me?

-Sure.

So we launched a study within a couple of weeks of it happening, asking people to tell their stories, as well as report on symptoms of psychological distress, like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, as well as psychological well-being, things like meaning in life, gratitude, a general sense of purpose that people might have.

And so what we found is that in the what we call the "acute stress period," that is basically three days to a month after a tragedy or a trauma, the relationships between the symptoms and well-being was jangled.

There was almost no relationship whatsoever.

Once we got into the post-traumatic stress period, well-being was negatively associated with symptoms.

So the more symptoms people felt, the lower their well-being was.

And it turned out that in the initial part of the acute stress period, people in the community had elevated levels of post-traumatic stress.

But about 50% of people who were at the festival would meet probable levels of symptoms that would be consistent with a PTSD diagnosis.

In the community, symptoms seem to recover almost completely on the whole by about three months out.

There were still some people who had elevated symptoms, but the mean levels in the sample, as a whole, were down about where we would have expected.

-So someone in the community, for example, in this situation, who's suffering, who's feeling the hurt, who wasn't actually there at the shooting, but who's, who's hurting, may have about three months of a period of recovery?

-Something like that.

-Okay.

-On the whole.

And there will be some people who are more strongly affected than others.

The people who were at the festival, by the time our year-long followup happened in the final wave of the study, their average levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms were about where the average level of those symptoms were in the community right afterward.

And we also saw a bump of depression happen in the community at that one-year event that didn't seem to happen for people in the festival, largely probably because they were still having relatively elevated levels of symptoms.

But even in the community, an anniversary effect may happen in a year.

-And Tennille, what kind of impact have you seen or do you expect to see as a result of this shooting on victims of 1 October who you've been serving?

-We have seen an impact.

-Already?

-Yes.

It's been very, very hard on them.

And in particular, the ones that are living here in Las Vegas or have connections to Vegas or UNLV.

We are a fairly small community, and almost everyone has some type of connection to UNLV.

So it feels a lot more personalized when you have that connection, and then these individuals have a mass violence connection from Las Vegas as well.

So it has been very emotional for them.

-Who needs to be seeking help, in your opinion?

-Anyone that's struggling.

There is help out there.

They don't have to go through this alone.

And you know, we really want to stress that.

To your point earlier, a lot of people think, I should be fine.

I should be fine.

I don't need help.

Others need help more than I do.

It's that kind of survivor's guilt.

There's others that are struggling more.

That is not the case.

There is plenty of help to go around, and we want people to reach out for resources if they're struggling.

-Also, for people who may not even be aware that they are in need of help, does the onus then fall on their loved ones?

And how do loved ones deliver that message?

-I'm not sure that the onus falls on them, but they may be another source of information for people.

Because when you are in the midst of processing this kind of trauma, sometimes you just don't even recognize what's going on.

You're having a hard time just figuring out what to do from hour to hour sometimes.

And so having that kind of reflection is much more challenging.

The thing that came out of this study that's really important to recognize is that there are going to be levels of suffering that people have that are probably normal and expectable reactions.

But that doesn't mean that they don't need help from other people.

And right now we're moving into a, an era in which we're moving towards skills for psychological recovery, because the acute trauma has passed.

And unlike a natural disaster, people's needs are now still probably met.

They're able to go back to their cars, the classrooms, their classrooms, get the information and the material that was left behind.

And so I think it is important that they exercise these skills to help themselves and make connections with other people.

-We so appreciate both of your time.

Thank you for coming on Nevada Week.