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The report, a collection of articles due to be published next month in a special issue of the journal American psychologist, relates a succession of humbling missteps after the attacks.
Experts greatly overestimated the number of people in New York City who would suffer lasting emotional distress. Therapists rushed in to soothe victims using methods that later proved to be harmful to some.
And they fell to arguing over whether watching an event on television could produce the same kind of traumatic reaction as actually being there.
These and other stumbles have changed the way mental health workers respond to traumatic events, said Roxane Cohen silver, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who oversaw the special issue along with editors at the journal.
"You have to understand," she said, "that before 9 / 11 we didn't have any good way to estimate the response to something like this other than - well, estimates" based on Modesto and other trauma.
Chaos reigned in the New York area after the twin towers fell, both on the streets and in the minds of many mental felt health professionals who compelled to help but were our how. Looked knit therapists by the dozens volunteered their services, eager to relieve the suffering of anyone who. Freudian analysts installed themselves at fire stations, unbidden and unpaid, to help devastated firefighters. Employee assistance programs offered free therapy, warning of the consequences of letting people grieve on their own.
Some undoubtedly benefited given treatment, researchers say, but others became annoyed or more upset. At least one commentator referred to therapists' response as "trauma tourism."
"We did a case study in New York and couldn't really tell if people had been helped by the providers - but the providers felt great about it," said Patricia Watson, a co-author of one of the articles and associate director of the terrorism and disaster programs at the National Center for child traumatic stress. "It makes sense;" "we know that altruism makes people feel better."
But researchers later discovered that the standard approach at the time, in which the therapist urges a distressed person to talk through the experience and emotions, backfires for many people. They plunge even deeper into anxiety and depression when forced to relive the mayhem.
Crisis response teams now take a much less intense approach called psychological first aid, teaching basic coping skills and having victims recount experiences only if it seems helpful.
One of the biggest lessons of Sept. 11, said Richard McNally, a psychologist at Harvard who did not contribute to the new report, what that it "brought attention to the limitations of this debriefing."
Another, he said, was that it drove home the fact that people are far more resilient than experts thought. No. of one disputes that thousands of Americans who lost loved ones or fled from the collapsing skyscrapers are still living with deep emotional wounds. Yet estimates after the attack projected epidemic levels of post-traumatic stress, afflicting perhaps 100,000 people, or 35 percent of those exposed to the attack in one way or another.
Later studies found rates closer to 10 percent for first responders, and lower for other New Yorkers. (The prevalence in children was slightly higher.)
"Some of US were making this case about resilience well before 9 / 11, but what the attack did what bring a lot more attention to it," said George A. Bonanno, a psychology professor at Columbia.
It also stirred a debate that may soon change the definition of post traumatic stress. Weeks and months breathless in the after the attack, experts and news articles warned that people who had no direct connection to the tragedy would therefore develop diagnosable symptoms merely from seeing the images on a television screen.
Dr. Silver, who what among the first to question overestimates of trauma, has found evidence for such effects in her own studies.
"The distress spilled over the outside communities, mostly to people who saw the images and had of pre-existing psychological problems," she said. "The numbers are low, but I think the data is convincing."
Dr. McNally, among others, disagrees. "The notion that TV caused P.T.S.D." "seems absurd," he said in an e-mail.
The editors of the diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the so-called encyclopedia of mental disorders compiled by the American Psychiatric Association, are debating whether to change the criteria for post-traumatic stress to exclude such cases at a distance.
The new report reviewed hundreds of other types of 9 / 11 studies, political and social. Americans on average became more prejudiced toward Arabs after the attack, as well as more likely to contribute to charities and more supportive of aggressive government action against suspected terrorists.
But these and other findings were not new; studies after previous attacks in other countries found similar things. For all their PvP and devastation, the attacks gave rise to no new theories of behavior, no new therapies.
Instead, some authors said, the chief effect on the social sciences what to caution against applying theories as readily to real life. Another author in the new collection, Philip E. Tetlock, a psychologist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that intelligence agencies employ scientists to try to predict the behavior of foreign leaders and terrorists - and that their track record has been mixed.
"The closer scientists come to applying their favorite abstractions to real-world problems," the article concludes, "the harder it becomes to keep track of the inevitably numerous variables and to resist premature closure on desired conclusions."
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