SULPHUR, Okla. — The Oklahoma Department of Health is providing mental health resources for the Sulphur community.
They set up Thursday in the Murray County Expo Center, and plan to be there for as long as the victims and volunteers need them.
Laura Spraggims was dropping supplies off there for her neighbors in need when she and her mom stumbled upon a mental health station.
With so much cleanup ahead of her, she didn’t think she had the time to talk about her grief and heartache.
But her mother asked her to sit down and try to talk it out.
“I didn’t want to talk to anybody,” said Spraggims. “As soon as we got here, I was like ‘Nope, I’m good.’ The nurse came up and she was like ‘Do you need to talk?’ I was like ‘Nope.’ She was like ‘Are you okay?’ I was like ‘Nope.’ But as soon as we sat down, you can’t hide those emotions, they come welling up.”
Spraggims was raised in Sulphur and wasn’t in town when the storms hit.
As she looks around the town she once knew, she said nothing is the same as it once was.
“When I first saw the drone footage, I was in my bathroom trying to be away from everybody, and I hyperventilated,” she said. “It hit home. This is home, and half of it is gone.”
She did finally sit down and talk through the trauma with a therapist provided by the health department.
She said it helped alleviate a little bit of the weight that she’s been carrying with her over the last five days.
“I felt like someone was gripping my heart the entire time I was here,” said Spraggims. “But talking, it released some of that. My chest is still tight, but I don’t feel like I’m suffocating now.”
Amelia Mattson, a Licensed Practical Nurse with the health department, said that is exactly why they’re here.
“People come in looking lost, and we just want to make sure, ‘Hey have you eaten today? Have you had something to drink? And tell me about what’s been going on in your life,’” said Mattson. “We’ve had several people who have lost homes or been injured in the storm, or volunteers who have just seen and heard things that they didn’t know they were going to see and hear.”
The health department had LPNs and nurses on the ground at the expo center to provide counseling, talking people through the trauma of losing everything that was once familiar to them.
The health department was here through the pandemic, and they intend to stay in Sulphur to support the victims, as well as the volunteers who are dealing with the wreckage firsthand.
Mattson said it’s important for everyone in the community to have someone to turn to to check in with.
“You kind of go into like an autopilot where you’re just doing what you need to do,” she said. “We’ve heard people who just quickly wanted to clean up glass that flew around in their home, or they quickly needed to pick up a relative who was in the area of the tornado, and they’re not really stopping to process what’s going on.”
For Spraggims, having that outlet to be validated in her feelings of grief and devastation, was exactly what she needed. After five days of utter despair, it gave her a little bit of clarity.
She encourages all of her neighbors to do the same, and not feel like they need to handle the stress and trauma of the devastation alone.
“Nobody needs to sit there and be like ‘Oh I got this to myself.’ Like no, we don’t got this, we don’t got this ourselves. It’s going to take the entire community to heal and to get through this, and to rebuild, because we’re going to rebuild, and it’s going to look amazing. But we need each other right now,” Spraggims said.
The health department will be in Sulphur providing on-site support, and if additional counseling or therapies are needed, they will refer individuals to surrounding agencies.
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