March 19, 1999

By David E. Drake, D.O.

Y2K: Worldwide computer shutdowns, no heat or electricity during the height of winter, food and water shortages, transportation halts. Who would have thought that such a strange abbreviation for the year 2000 would receive so much attention and create so much uncertainty?

I was just recovering from my own tendency to hysteria after reading the Y2K Citizen's Action Guide, a supplement to Utne Reader (available online at www.utne.com/y2k), when in my own home I was struck by how my dependably logical wife began talking about slowly stocking up on food supplies over the next year.

With a series of featured articles in our local paper, including a statement by a Des Moines utility official that services are not guaranteed as of midnight on January 1, 2000, I began to talk to my wife about how we might handle the absence of heat in our home. I considered extra blankets, sharing a family bed to keep us warm, down sleeping bags, and even the apparently growing focus on buying a generator.

As I began to think about how tied our community, our country, and our world is to computer technology, I began to realize how dependent each of us is on utility companies for our heat, grocery stores for our food, and gas stations to keep our cars moving. Only a small minority of us produce our own food, heat our own homes, or have horses for transportation.

A problem with us humans is that we are immensely affected by the anxiety around us-in each other. This same attribute allowed our species to survive periods of uncertainty and possible danger in our primitive past. Stocking up on food and fuel and even considering moving to a more hospitable climate are but a few of the ways in which we react instinctively to threats to ourselves, our families, and our communities.

At a certain point, when anxiety reaches a maximum, we start operating on automatic-as though our thinking brain is turned off while a more primitive part of our brain begins to take over our actions and emotions. And while this "no-brainer" is effective for immediate action in a crisis, it won't serve our communities as we prepare for an unknown outcome of our technological era.

The Utne Reader action guide assumes that some citizens will go to the extreme. They will arm themselves with weapons, move to rural areas, taking a "me-first" attitude, focusing only on their own families. However, the authors offer an alternative to hysteria and panic - asserting a very different model for our consideration-that of neighborhood and community preparation.

To think of ourselves as part of a larger community is to see that should the worse scenario prove true, we will be called upon to prepare and provide for those without the resources to care for themselves.

Psychiatrists and other physicians can provide a voice of reason and help their communities prepare. The best prevention of panic and hysteria is for each of us to let our community leaders know that we expect supplies of food and water for our neighbors who can't afford to stockpile. They need to know that we expect reasonable emergency shelters with backup generators for any of us who may no longer have heat in our homes. We need to expect bathing areas so that we can maintain our health and hygiene. Our mayors and governors need to know that this uncertainty may require a preparation unlike no other event in our memory banks.

As neighbors, it will behoove us to get to know one another. Breaking down barriers may not prove easy, but depending on each other for assistance and resources may prove all too important if severe problems should erupt.

The mental health of our communities requires that each of us do what we can to prepare reasonably for the worst for ourselves and our families, while also ensuring that our neighbors next door and our fellow citizens across town will have access to resources to ensure their comfort and survival.

Y2K, as the authors from the action guide conclude, brings us together to realize as perhaps never before in modern times that we are inextricably interconnected. For the next year, the problem lies in separating out alarming hype from thoughtful commentary. Of course, the distinction may become apparent only after midnight on that first day of the new millennium.

Indeed, we have no guarantees. By this summer, we may have a better idea of what kind of fix we are in. I hope that we will wake up on January 1 of the next New Year laughing at how we overprepared. The alternative is too frightening to contemplate.

Dr. Drake is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences in Des Moines, Iowa.