The research team, a collaboration between the university’s Department of Psychology and the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, surveyed 363 people across Tucson’s south side and a carefully matched comparison neighborhood. Among participants who lived, worked, or attended school in the contaminated area before 1981, or whose parents did, 34 percent reported enough symptoms to cross a screening threshold that clinicians routinely use to flag probable post-traumatic stress disorder. That figure was drawn from a seven-item checklist asking respondents whether worry about the contamination had produced specific experiences during the past month, including avoiding places that brought the contamination to mind, sleeping poorly, or feeling cut off and detached from other people. Reporting four or more of the seven criteria was treated as the threshold for further clinical attention.

The study was led by Harrison Schmitt, who carried out the work as his doctoral dissertation at the University of Arizona and is now an assistant professor of psychology at Skidmore College. Daniel Sullivan, the study’s senior author and an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, said the persistence of the effect was the most startling element of the results. “It was pretty striking how long the impact of this seems to have been,” Sullivan said. For a community whose exposure officially ended when the city stopped serving contaminated water on its south side in 1981, the survival of trauma symptoms across four decades suggests that environmental contamination can function not merely as a past event but as an ongoing, inherited burden carried through families and neighborhoods.

To contextualize the magnitude of that burden, Sullivan’s team administered the same screening instrument in 2025 to Los Angeles residents whose homes were threatened by wildfires, a group experiencing an acute, vivid, and recent disaster. Roughly 35 percent of those respondents scored at or above the PTSD screening threshold, a figure nearly identical to the rate found among Tucson’s south side residents remembering exposures that ended generations ago. The parallel is consequential for the field of disaster psychology, which has historically calibrated its expectations around discrete, cinematic catastrophes such as tornadoes, floods, and fires. Sullivan, who studied tornado survivors in Kansas for his own dissertation, has long argued that technological disasters deserve separate theoretical treatment because they unfold over years, lack a single identifiable day of damage, and often involve prolonged institutional silence or denial about what occurred.

Before the survey was even designed, Sullivan spent years attending community meetings on Tucson’s south side, an investment in local trust that shaped every subsequent stage of the project. Beginning in the summer of 2022, approximately twenty undergraduate volunteers collected the survey door to door in pairs, with each pair including at least one bilingual student so that questionnaires could be offered in both English and Spanish. The ground-level method produced insights that no mailed questionnaire could capture. Many of the volunteers came from the south side themselves, and several learned in the course of their canvassing that their own relatives and neighbors had lived through the contamination and had rarely, if ever, spoken about it. The data collection thus doubled as an act of oral history, surfacing family silences that had persisted alongside the symptoms the survey was designed to measure.

A critical methodological safeguard was the construction of a comparison group. The researchers deliberately selected a second Tucson neighborhood matched to the south side on income, race and ethnicity, and housing characteristics, ensuring that differences in trauma symptom rates could be attributed to the contamination itself rather than to the chronic socioeconomic stressors both areas share. This design choice strengthens the study’s central inference considerably. Residents of the matched neighborhood face comparable economic pressure, comparable discrimination, and comparable housing instability, yet they did not carry the same psychological load, pointing to the contaminated water as the decisive distinguishing exposure.

Elizabeth Yee, a co-author and Ph.D. student in psychology who first worked on the survey as an undergraduate and later led the effort to report the findings back to residents, described the emotional texture of the canvassing work. “You’re talking to people and it’s every other house. At a community level, the findings are validating. At an institutional level, it still feels like, ‘When is it going to be enough evidence to act?'” she said. Her remark captures a tension running through the entire research program: the same data that affirms residents’ lived experience also documents how slowly institutional recognition has moved relative to the scale of harm. The researchers describe the pattern they uncovered as collective trauma, a framework in which a devastating event is shared across a community and transmitted through common experiences and stories rather than being experienced and processed only as individual psychological injury.

The study’s community-facing dimension owes much to Alisha Vasquez, a disability cultures folklorist at the Southwest Folklife Alliance and a co-director of Tucson’s Mexican American Heritage and History Museum. Vasquez helped connect the research team with south side residents and convened a community meeting that shaped how the survey results are now being deployed for political action. “They fought their entire lives, not just for restitution, but to be heard and believed,” Vasquez said. Her framing underscores a theme that quantifies poorly but matters enormously in the epidemiology of environmental injustice: the harm of contamination compounds when survivors’ accounts are dismissed, and part of the healing process involves official acknowledgment that the harm was real. In December 2025, a memorial honoring the victims of the historic contamination was unveiled in Mission Manor Park as part of Vasquez’s community-based arts initiatives on the topic, a physical landmark for a history that many families had carried silently.

The research has already moved beyond the pages of an academic journal. Working with Vasquez and other community activists, the research team has presented its findings to Tucson Water, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Tucson Mayor and Council. The City Council responded by passing a resolution urging the Pima County Health Department to address the impacts of the contamination, converting a psychological survey into an instrument of municipal policy. For the researchers, that trajectory reflects the specific history of the place rather than a novelty. “Tucson was a historic leader in fighting for recognition of these issues,” Sullivan said. “This is a community with a lot of resilience.” The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, its authorship, or its publication.

The scientific implications of the study extend well beyond southern Arizona. As climate-driven wildfires, industrial accidents, and aging water infrastructure expose growing populations to environmental threats, the Tucson findings suggest that the mental health consequences of such events may be measured in generations rather than news cycles. A screening threshold crossed by one in three exposed residents forty years after the fact implies that standard disaster-response timelines, which concentrate psychological services in the weeks and months following an acute event, are poorly matched to slow-onset technological disasters. The Tucson study offers both a warning and a template: the warning that contamination quietly externalizes its costs onto community mental health for decades, and the template that door-to-door, bilingual, community-partnered research can document those costs with enough rigor and legitimacy to compel institutional response.

Subject of Research: Long-term psychological trauma among residents exposed to historical water contamination in Tucson

Article Title: One in three Tucsonans exposed to historic water contamination still report signs of psychological trauma

Article References: One in three Tucsonans exposed to historic water contamination still report signs of psychological trauma. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Tucson, water contamination, PTSD, collective trauma, environmental injustice, groundwater, industrial solvents, public health, Journal of Health Psychology, community-based research, disaster psychology, University of Arizona

The study, conducted by Tuğba Karadaşlı of Tatvan State Hospital and Mesut Arslan of Bitlis Eren University, enrolled 44 earthquake-affected adults aged between 18 and 65. To enter the trial, participants had to meet rigorous clinical thresholds: either a formal DSM-5 diagnosis of PTSD made by a psychiatrist, or a score of 47 or higher on the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist for DSM-5, widely known as the PCL-5, which indicates clinically significant symptom burden. The researchers used block randomization to allocate 22 participants to an intervention group and 22 to a control group, a method that helps ensure balanced group sizes and reduces the risk of selection bias. Everyone in the trial received standard psychoeducation about PTSD and healthy lifestyle habits, and those already receiving ongoing treatment were permitted to continue it unchanged.

The intervention itself was elegantly straightforward. Participants in the experimental group underwent six weeks of Progressive Muscle Relaxation Training, delivered through telerehabilitation in twice-weekly sessions lasting 20 to 30 minutes each. The technique, first developed in the early twentieth century, is grounded in a simple physiological principle: by systematically tensing and then releasing specific muscle groups throughout the body, individuals learn to recognize and deliberately reduce physical tension. Because heightened muscle tension is closely intertwined with the autonomic arousal that sustains PTSD symptoms, the repeated practice of releasing that tension is thought to dampen the body’s chronic stress response, indirectly easing the intrusive thoughts, sleep disturbance, and emotional volatility that characterize the disorder. Crucially, the technique requires no medication, produces no pharmacological side effects, and can be self-administered once learned, making it an unusually practical tool for disaster settings where clinical resources are stretched thin.

To capture the full spectrum of trauma’s impact, the researchers assessed participants before and after the intervention using a battery of validated instruments. The PCL-5 measured PTSD symptom severity; the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21, or DASS-21, quantified three distinct dimensions of psychological distress; the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index tracked sleep disturbance, one of the most debilitating and persistent consequences of trauma; the Fatigue Severity Scale gauged exhaustion, which frequently accompanies chronic hyperarousal; and the Short Form-36 health survey assessed both physical and mental components of quality of life. Statistical analysis relied on two-way mixed analysis of variance to examine time-by-group interactions, with significance set at a threshold of p less than 0.05.

The results were unambiguous and, in places, dramatic. Among participants who received the relaxation training, PTSD symptom severity fell significantly after the intervention, with a time-group interaction yielding p less than 0.001 and a partial eta squared of 0.735, an effect size indicating that the intervention accounted for the overwhelming majority of the variance in symptom change between groups. For context, in behavioral intervention research, partial eta squared values above 0.14 are conventionally considered large; a value approaching 0.74 is exceptional. But the benefits did not stop at PTSD symptoms. Compared with controls, the trained group showed significant improvements in depression, with an effect size of 0.435; anxiety, at 0.521; stress, at 0.504; sleep quality, at 0.632; fatigue, at 0.477; and both the physical and mental components of quality of life, at 0.727 and 0.630 respectively, all with p values below 0.001.

Equally instructive was what happened to the control group. Participants who received only psychoeducation and standard care showed no significant improvement on any of the measured parameters over the six-week period. More sobering still, their sleep quality and physical health actually deteriorated during the study window, a pattern consistent with the natural history of untreated post-disaster PTSD, in which symptoms tend to persist or worsen without targeted intervention. This divergence between the two groups strengthens the causal interpretation of the findings, because both groups had equal access to general health information and continued treatment, meaning the relaxation training itself, delivered remotely, stands out as the active ingredient driving recovery.

The telerehabilitation delivery model deserves particular attention. By conducting sessions remotely, the researchers sidestepped one of the most persistent barriers to mental health care in disaster zones: the sheer difficulty of transporting survivors, many of them displaced, injured, or caregiving for children, to clinical facilities. Remote delivery also multiplied the reach of a limited number of trained providers across geographically dispersed populations. The authors note that telerehabilitation may offer a practical advantage when face-to-face care is limited, while appropriately characterizing this interpretation as speculative pending further research. Even so, the model aligns with a growing international literature showing that structured psychological interventions can be effectively delivered at a distance, and the trial’s registration on ClinicalTrials.gov under identifier NCT07164261 signals a commitment to prospective transparency.

The scientific rationale for why muscle relaxation should help trauma survivors is worth unpacking. PTSD is increasingly understood not merely as a psychological condition but as a disorder of physiological regulation, in which the sympathetic nervous system remains locked in a threat-detection mode long after danger has passed. Elevated resting muscle tension, altered heart rate variability, exaggerated startle responses, and fragmented sleep all reflect this persistent arousal state. Progressive Muscle Relaxation interrupts the loop from the bottom up: the deliberate contrast between tension and release trains interoceptive awareness, giving individuals a felt sense of what relaxation actually is and a reproducible method for achieving it. Over repeated sessions, this practiced downregulation of somatic arousal appears to generalize, reducing the baseline hyperarousal that fuels re-experiencing symptoms and avoidance behaviors. The trial’s broad improvements across depression, anxiety, stress, sleep, fatigue, and quality of life fit neatly with this mechanism, since these outcomes all share hyperarousal as a common physiological substrate.

Caveats remain. The trial involved 44 participants, a sample size determined by power analysis but still modest by the standards of multi-site trials, and the study was conducted at a single institution in a specific disaster context. The comparison group received education rather than an active alternative therapy, so the findings cannot yet speak to how Progressive Muscle Relaxation compares with first-line treatments such as trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. Longer follow-up is needed to determine whether the gains persist after training ends, and the mechanisms mediating the improvements were not directly measured. Nevertheless, the combination of large effect sizes, a rigorous randomized design, objective validated outcome measures, and a delivery model suited to resource-constrained settings makes this one of the more compelling demonstrations of a minimal-intervention approach to disaster-related PTSD.

The implications reach well beyond Turkey. Earthquakes, floods, wildfires, and conflicts displace tens of millions of people each year, and post-disaster mental health need consistently outstrips the available supply of psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists. An intervention that is free of side effects, costs almost nothing, requires no medication, and can be taught remotely in twelve short sessions represents exactly the kind of scalable tool the field has been searching for. If future studies replicate and extend these findings, Progressive Muscle Relaxation Training could become a standard component of disaster response protocols worldwide, offered alongside shelter, food, and medical care as a first line of defense for traumatized minds. For the survivors of Kahramanmaraş, the message from this research is quietly revolutionary: healing may not always require what victims lack, but can begin with something as simple, and as universally available, as learning to let go.

Subject of Research: Progressive Muscle Relaxation Training as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder in survivors of the Kahramanmaraş earthquake

Article Title: Efficacy of progressive muscle relaxation training in post-traumatic stress disorder after the Kahramanmaraş earthquake: a randomized controlled trial

Article References: Karadaşlı, T., & Arslan, M. (2026). Efficacy of progressive muscle relaxation training in post-traumatic stress disorder after the Kahramanmaraş earthquake: a randomized controlled trial. BMC Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-026-08676-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12888-026-08676-9

Keywords: PTSD, progressive muscle relaxation, Kahramanmaraş earthquake, telerehabilitation, randomized controlled trial, sleep quality, mental health, disaster psychology, anxiety, depression, quality of life, BMC Psychiatry