For 57 consecutive days during World War II, the city of London endured relentless and harrowing fire bombing by German forces. All the while, Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, was running nursery schools.

Anna Freud reported that only a handful of children in these so-called War Nurseries required professional psychological help, but many of today's mental health professionals would be stunned to hear this. They would have predicted lifelong mental scarring for many or most of those young children. They might even say that Anna Freud was in serious denial.

Nowadays, when ambulances and police race to a disaster scene, the trauma counselors aren’t far behind. They are ready to administer psychological first aid, whether it is solicited or not. Counselors have become a fixture of disaster's aftermath in America. Their obvious doubts about our natural resilience stoke the perception that we are easily damaged by crisis. But are we?

Barbara Harrell-Bond, an American social anthropologist, spent her life working with refugees from Uganda and other war-torn African countries. Her work reminds us that people can respond to disaster in one of three dominant ways: as threat, as loss, or as challenge. The refugees that she worked with, Harrell-Bond says, saw the imperative to rebuild their lives as a challenge, even in the face of great emotional devastation. But for the bulk of the trauma professionals in the U.S., it is the drama of threat and loss, not challenge, which takes center stage.

Of course my colleagues and I must be ready to care for those who are psychologically damaged by crisis, but it is simply wrong to think that most people will be crippled by catastrophe. Changed profoundly, perhaps, but not damaged. It is an epidemiological fact that about half of us have encountered a severe trauma--a serious car accident, an assault, combat-- yet between only 1 and 10 percent develop of us a condition called posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) over the course of a lifetime.

PTSD is a disabling condition marked by intense re-experiencing of the horrific event in the form of relentless nightmares, unbidden waking images, generally accompanied by crippling anxiety and phobias.

You’ll hear me talk a lot about PTSD because it is that condition that trauma counselors believe their interventions can prevent--though there is no evidence they succeed and some showing that their efforts can actually cause harm.

Though it is a legitimate diagnosis PTSD is often woefully misapplied. Too often we see mental health professionals "medicalizing the human condition," as psychiatrist Paul Chodoff puts it. They do this, Chodoff writes, when they apply "diagnostic labels to various unpleasant or undesirable feelings that . . . are not readily distinguishable from the range of experiences that are often inescapable aspects of the fate of being human.". There are victims who supposedly develop PTSD after being told dirty jokes on the job (and winning legal settlements based on this complaint--something that should traumatize the rest of us), after accidentally killing frogs with a lawnmower, and movie-goers diagnosed with PTSD after being spooked by watching seeing The Exorcist (those case studies were published in the respected Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease).

When definitions of trauma are ludicrously defined down--when drivers involved in a one-mile-per hour fender bender are regarded the same, diagnostically speaking, as survivors of the Bataan Death March--then the concept of trauma has become meaningless and the ordeals and suffering of seriously traumatized people are trivialized.

And . . . when definitions of trauma are dumbed down, so are reasons to call in the counselors. For example, in Oregon, crisis counselors were summoned to meet with the employees of Portland General Electric when their 401K accounts took a bad hit. In Massachusetts they helped librarians cope with the destruction of books when the basement of the Boston Public Library flooded in 1998.

So when events are indisputably horrific--not warped library books but, an attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon--many mental health professionals see themselves as indispensable. Why do they presume we are so fragile in the face of powerful events?

Sept 11 provided a showcase for the low expectations the mental health profession has of us; their vast underestimation of our inherent resilience and resourcefulness. A psychiatrist at St Vincent’s Hospital, much quoted in the media because his hospital was relatively close to Ground Zero--foretold "huge increases in the prevalence of depression, posttraumatic stress disorder and substance abuse." The New York City commissioner of Health and Mental Health, told Congress in a hearing devoted to the mental health consequences of 9-11, that "we face the possibility of a sharp increase in chronic and disabling mental health problems."

Granted, these urgent statements were made soon after the attacks, while our collective nervous system was still reverberating. Yet weeks and months later, when cooler heads might have prevailed, the warnings remained frantic and grim. Why?

One key explanation is the very nature of clinical work. People who cope independently and in successful ways are, by definition, removed from the clinical picture. This leaves some practitioners to generalize, mistakenly, from those they DO see (that is, the ones who ARE overwhelmed and ARE symptomatic), to generalize from them to the rest of us to. This phenomenon has been well noted in the med literature and has its own name: "the clinician’s illusion."

And because so many mental health professionals (and the policymakers they advise) were in the grip of an illusion about our inability to cope after 9-11, we saw armies of grief and trauma counselors descend on NYC. Up to 9000 counselors rushed to Ground Zero.

Where do these counselors come from? In our book we speculate on the conditions that enabled the trauma industry to flourish. Right now, though I will answer the question specifically: where do trauma counselors come from? They come from Baltimore.

That is the home of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation--it is ground zero of the trauma industry, training about 30,000 trauma counselors a year. Anyone with $200 and a high school diploma is eligible to be certified--including me--so I took the two-day course. There we learned how to do "debriefing" of trauma victims - victims defined broadly as anyone who had been endangered in a crisis, who had witnessed the danger or felt somehow threatened. Debriefing takes place in a group with 8-10 victims, and is led by counselor for a couple of hours. Generally it takes place within a few days of event. The role of the counselor is to urge the victims to recite their most painful thoughts and feelings. Rehash gruesome images and emote about their fears. Our debriefing manual described this as an "opportunity for catharsis, an opportunity to verbalize trauma."

Don’t get me wrong: If people want to talk (and cry and scream) with friends or family after an intense experience--and most people DO--that’s fine. But formal, counselor-led debriefing in which horrors are relived can be harmful.

Recently, the trauma industry has been criticized for promoting a one-size fits all prescription that ignores differences in individual victims’ temperament and coping style. Nine scientifically rigorous studies of debriefing have found that in most cases the emotional venting during debriefing made no difference--people who got it after life-threatening accidents or burns or assault--recovered as quickly as did those not "treated." What was worrisome, however, was that a minority of patients who were debriefed actually had their emotional improvement slowed down because of it. Most likely, this is because reliving a ghastly experience in the immediate aftermath can interfere with victims’ natural adaptive instinct to distance themselves.

In the book we have a chapter called "Emotional Correctness" where we document many studies showing how the popular psychological imperatives to "get it all out" and "feel it to heal it" do not always work. We show that when people are distraught, ruminating about their pain may only intensify it: repression and distraction can be the best remedies. We show that there are no correct ways to experience bereavement -there aren’t even the 5 reliable stages of grief (denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance). There is enormous individual variation that is perfectly healthy.

Unfortunately, such research findings don’t often filter down to the ranks of the workshop trained grief counselors and the self-help books written by grief gurus. And this is a problem. When the grieving person does not conform to popular notions of how she is supposed to feel and act; if the stages don’t seem to be moving along, concerned family and friends may prod her into therapy. Often this will just be a waste of time and money- as few but those who are devastated to the point of dysfunction tend to benefit from therapy -but at worse it may actually amplify the sadness and anxiety associated with loss.

I want to switch, now, back to the predictions that there would be a national, if not NYC-wide, epidemic of PTSD after 9-11. There wasn’t. Report after report from area hospitals in NYC showed that few new clients came for help. People who came were overwhelmingly those with pre-existing psych problems. Even numbers of prescriptions for tranquilizers and antidepressants did not differ much, if at all (depending upon the survey), from the years before.

Yet, according to the New York State Office of Mental Health, 1 in 4 New Yorkers were projected to have needed counseling. But a year after FEMA gave $130 in June 2002, $90 m was still unspent . . . despite massive advertising of counseling on radio, subways, newspapers, 20 million flyers distributed. People were devastated, yes, but this was a human response, not a pathological one.

According to today’s trauma industry, with its fixation on threat and loss, the principal lesson one should learn from suffering is that one must get over it. But as Barbara Harrell-Bond says: trauma can bring challenge, not just the defeat of threat and loss.

Invoking a concept called "post traumatic growth" researchers have produced scores of studies showing that the majority of trauma survivors have benefited from their struggle to cope. They talk of enhanced self-reliance, better relationships with family and friends, and a sharper focus on life’s priorities.

Case in point. Renee Garfinkle of GWU studied a group of elderly Israeli nursing home residents during the Gulf War. She predicted "deleterious effects" of the prolonged stress of bombing in this group of frail elderly, especially among Holocaust survivors, not only because they had already been through one horrific experience but also because the threat of poison gas could be a reminder of Nazi gas chambers. But she found that during the war and for six months after, neither mental nor physical complaints had increased. In fact, petty grievances and conflicts among the residents decreased.

These residents needed what most people need in a crisis: as much information as possible (Garfinkle noted they were ravenous for news/Guiliani understood this). They also need social scaffolding to support the bedrock institutions and relationships--families, communities, and houses of worship--that have always served them in times of uncertainty and immense sorrow. For those overwhelmed by extreme events, credentialed professionals should be ready to help. For the majority, mental health will follow naturally.

But in our trauma-conscious society, many mental health professionals seem eager to manage the collective anxiety surrounding terrorism and its aftermath. Said psychiatrist Randall Marshall, director of Trauma Studies for the New York State Psychiatric Institute associated with Columbia University, "The challenge for psychiatrists "is how to help people live in a world that is constantly under threat." We disagree. One of the lessons from September 11 is that the clinician’s role in a shocked and heartbroken world is actually quite limited--sometimes even destructive.

In our book, Christina and I have tried to correct several myths: she told you about the myth that large swaths of the population are suffering more psychic duress than in the past, that self esteem is a sine qua non for success and competition for kids is bad. We see that being in touch with your feelings is not necessarily a good thing--and that the tender mercies of unsolicited helping professionals do not improve our coping. We roundly reject a so-called "spun glass theory of the mind"--that says that people are prone to shatter in the face of adversity.

We contend, in other words, that human beings are best regarded as self-reliant, resilient, psychically sound moral agents responsible for their behavior. For, with few exceptions, that is what we are.