Introduction

I don't live in America, let alone in New York. I live in Central London under the Heathrow flight path. It was not long ago that my house was shaken by the final flights of the last three Concordes. On September 11, 2001, we experienced the opposite, a strange week of silence, when all flights were banned for a week. And when they resumed for a while I looked out of my window as each plane came past and experienced a frisson of anxiety. Like virtually everyone I know, it took sometime to shake off those hypnotic images imprinted in my memory from those hours glued to our TV screens throughout the horrors of that first day.

But not for a moment did I consider that I had a problem, let alone seek help for it.And after a few weeks these emotions disappeared. Yes, my view of the world had changed, as had my appraisal of the society we live in and the threats we face. The world seemed, and probably was, a riskier place (Halpern-Felsher & Millstein, 2002; Roberts & Em, 2003). But emotionally and physically I felt the same as I had been before, for better or worse.

When I visited America only a few weeks later, to take part, ironically, in a prearranged conference on psychological responses to mass violence (National Institute of Mental Health, 2002), I observed something else. September 11th had also brought about positive changes in the society that I have visited so many times.