How a plane crash helped prove people should be left alone

This week’s feature story, “Stop Hugging Us,” looks at how research from the nearly 30-year-old Hyatt collapse is affecting treatment of post-traumatic stress treatment today. Turns out, it might be best to leave people alone, instead of making them talk about their feelings.

Like any good research, there was more than one test case, and this time that second group of subjects came from a plane crash in Sioux City, Iowa.

United Airlines flight 232 went down on July 19, 1981, en route to Chicago from Denver. A failure of the plane’s No. 2 engine resulted in further breakdown of the plane’s hydraulic systems. The plane broke up during emergency landing on a Sioux City runway, killing 110 of the 285 passengers.

For research purposes, the similarity of the disasters were helpful.

Almost the exact same number of people had been killed — though in

case their backgrounds were more divergent than the metro residents

killed in the Hyatt.

Richard Gist, a Kansas City

researcher who’d studied the response to the Hyatt disaster, used the

similarities to further examine stress reactions among emergency responders.