Healing After Helene: One Pirate therapist’s call to serve

After Hurricane Helene struck the mountains of western North Carolina, word of the destruction leaked slowly from the mountainsides and overwashed valleys. For one Pirate alum, a family rescue mission quickly turned into a mission of service for the communities she calls home.

Karen Jenkins, a licensed clinical mental health counselor, was raised in Ohio but moved to McDowell County at the western end of the state in time for high school.

Jenkins completed her undergraduate education at East Carolina University and went on to complete dual master’s degrees from the College of Allied Health Science’s Department of Addictions and Rehabilitation Studies. After graduation from ECU, she settled in Greenville with a new husband and new baby to work in private practice, including telehealth.

She always had a desire to give back, an ethic instilled by her parents and grandparents. About 10 years ago she got involved with the Red Cross, but her job and young family limited how much time she could devote to service.

“I started making plans to go back to nursing school, and eventually when my kiddo went to high school, I was going to try and do international humanitarian aid. That was my plan, but I had that plan sort of turned upside down,” Jenkins said.

Karen Jenkins is a clinical therapist and a graduate of the College of Allied Health Science’s addictions and rehabilitation studies program.

The storm

Jenkins’ family continues to live across North Carolina’s western counties, and in late summer of 2024, her brother, sister-in-law and their four children were staying in a rental house in Swannanoa. They were looking for places to live as they planned a permanent move from Utah.

When Helene’s interminable rains reached the mountains, their rental house was hit by a landslide that killed two of their neighbors. They felt the house shift off its foundation and then scrambled up the hill with the four kids in tow — the youngest just 4 — to some semblance of safety in the backyard of another neighbor.

“She is a widow with a 4-year-old, and she’s now like family to us. So, the three adults and the five kids under 10 survive those next few days together while an apocalypse was happening around them,” Jenkins said.

Inexplicably, her brother had cell service. He told her how incredibly loud the water rushing down the mountain was. Then came the whoosh of search and rescue and supply helicopters flying low and emergency sirens echoing up from the valley floor.

Through the miracles of social media and satellite phones, Jenkins was able to determine that the rest of her family in the region was safe. She used maps to find ways for her family members to get to passable roads and made the trip from Greenville to find them.

Once in the calm of Pitt County, her brother’s family got bedded down the road from her house to start the process of recovering their lives and hearts.

“We surrounded them with love and space, but they lost their car and homeschooling supplies,” Jenkins said. “My nephew told me, ‘When I climbed, every time I put my hand in the ground, water just came out.’ They just needed somewhere to be that was flat.”

A new mission

If Hurricane Helene had any value, it showed Jenkins she couldn’t wait for her child’s graduation to start making a difference, and the need for her skill set might be a lot closer to home than she had expected.

The mountains are her home, and where her parents still lived. She had to do something.

East Carolina University alum Karen Jenkins poses with Greg Lewis, pastor of the Rapha House Church in Mills River, in front of a vehicle loaded with supplies donated to victims of Hurricane Helene.

She worked a few shifts with the Red Cross in McDowell County and delivered supplies in Spruce Pine and Barnardsville in the storm’s immediate aftermath, but she knew she had more to offer. She knows the people, speaks Spanish decently and had training and experience in trauma counseling.

A group of friends from high school — including one who also graduated from ECU’s master’s in clinical counseling program — banded together to start a 501c3 nonprofit called Carolina Hearts, Community Resilience in Action.

“I have so many things that I’ve wanted to do in terms of mental health, but the demand for basics was so great that I couldn’t solely focus on mental health,” Jenkins said.

In the year since the storm, she’s found herself shuttling back and forth to the mountains, bringing supplies and cultivating long-term funding sources, while raising a child and working with clients at her full-time job.

With the winter coming, she’s cognizant that there is only so much time in each day. Writing by-laws for a nonprofit or making sure a family has propane for heat?

“Morally, ethically, I can’t not pay attention to that,” Jenkins said.

But that doesn’t mean counseling is taking a back seat. Some affected by the storm are back in their houses and at work — beginning to come to terms with their experiences. Others, however, were already living on the edge and are still clawing their way back to some sense of normalcy.

“The recovery needs are huge and on a spectrum. Some people are about to have their lights cut off, or their car repoed, or some don’t even have a car and are still fighting with FEMA,” Jenkins said.

One of her successes has been working with kids in schools. She’s built toolkits with evidence-based coping skill cards and trauma resources, but the most memorable thing was just sitting with a group of elementary-aged kids and reading a book or practicing breathing techniques.

“The kids started to tell me their stories; they wanted me to go play on their playground and it was wonderful,” Jenkins said. “I really want to have a trailer that I can hook to the back of a truck and be able to go where the need is, for crisis debriefing for law enforcement or a trauma-related session, or even just a place for people out of the elements, to sit and have a cup of tea.”

Setting up nonprofit

Karen Jenkins sits on a storage rack attached to a vehicle she uses to ferry supplies to western North Carolina during trips to support recovery efforts.

One of Jenkins’ frustrations has been the drop in public awareness of the storm’s impact in the mountains. At about the same time, people in Los Angeles were rightfully supported in their loss from wildfires, but challenges faced by those in western North Carolina faded quickly from the public’s consciousness, she said.

“There were times I felt like I was shouting into the dark. People would find out I’m helping with disaster relief and say, ‘Isn’t that getting cleaned up?’” Jenkins said. “It was hard to keep a straight face because it was so stressful, the information not getting out.”

Jenkins said she is bringing supplies to those who still need help, but that is a way in to support the hub leaders, as she calls them — individuals stepping up from churches and civic groups and just ordinary people who are making sure babies have diapers and neighbors get to medical appointments. Mental health starts, she stressed, with having the basics under control.

“I love the opportunity to get to support them, and then they support me too. It’s been this beautiful web of people I never thought I would have met, who are going to be friends for life,” Jenkins said.

The need for counseling isn’t going away any time soon, Jenkins believes.

“There were definitely folks struggling with addiction who are just shoving their trauma down. It’s avoidance, survival, that sort of thing. The true impact is not going to be known for many, many years,” Jenkins said.

Dr. Celeste Crawford, a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Addictions and Rehabilitation Studies, said that there isn’t a specific class that teaches ECU students about counseling in disaster scenarios, but rather counseling techniques are woven into the fabric of the entire program. There is no specific qualification for emergency behavioral health care, but she and her colleagues ensure that all of their students have the skills necessary to take on that role, because sooner or later they will probably be asked to.

“As a mental health professional, it’s your moral obligation to support your community when things aren’t going well, if there’s a disaster or if you want to respond to a disaster,” Crawford said.

Crawford has spent many nights sleeping in tents and “showering in barns” as a disaster relief volunteer — from wildfires in Colorado to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, where she “saw some pretty horrible things.”

“I was working for Pitt County Mental Health when Hurricane Floyd hit in 1999, and we were all reassigned to disaster response for a month. I worked the phones in the county office building, and I flew on a helicopter out to some of the shelters,” Crawford said.

Jenkins said there is a need for counselors who are willing to get on a donkey or a four-wheeler to get into disaster areas, or to leverage video conferencing technologies that are increasingly feasible. But connectivity is still a challenge in an emergency, especially one that “wipes the board clean” and reduces everyone’s needs to the basics of survival.

Psychological first aid is a triage model, Crawford said. Counselors aren’t going to sit on a couch to talk with patients about their deepest feelings, rather they look to staunch any acute needs and refer patients to others outside of the disaster zone.

The therapist’s role in an emergency scenario also involves care for response workers, who often take on huge psychological loads.

“We tend to get paired up with them because they’re the ones driving or flying or getting you around. In the midst of it, they don’t necessarily think they want help, but then they end up talking to you,” Crawford said. “Sometimes they just need someone to listen and hear what they’ve been doing and acknowledge how hard it is.”

Jenkins said an added benefit of having her qualifications is a large list of contacts that she can refer those in need to. She can’t do in-depth counseling while an emergency is unfolding, but behavioral health triage is as important as getting disaster survivors into the back of an ambulance, she said.

“I needed to have boundaries around offering therapy. People would know that I’m in mental health, and they’d say, ‘I’ve got so-and-so who is going through some things. Could you talk to them?’” Jenkins said. “There was this beautiful group on Facebook of like a thousand clinicians that started right after the storm who were offering pro bono sessions, so I would connect people together.”

Crawford hasn’t been the one with muddy boots for some time and sees her job as being an elder in the therapy community, helping with referrals and being the trusted voice the new generation can call for a reassuring voice.

“I’m going to stay here and I’m going to be the person they can call and tell me how they’re doing,” Crawford said.

ECU prepared her for this next evolution in ways she expected, and in ways that she couldn’t have foreseen through her undergraduate and graduate schooling. A minor in Spanish has been universally helpful, as were classes in psychology and neuroscience, but the counseling program gave her tools that she was able to immediately use in the mountains, like psychological first aid.

“I’m doing something that the younger me, the grad school me, would be really proud of,” Jenkins said.

More Blogs