More than 3,000 elementary school and junior high school students in Hyogo Prefecture still suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder nearly seven years after the devastating 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, according to a survey by the Hyogo prefectural education board.
According to the survey, released Monday, the number of children identified by teachers as warranting special consideration due to lost appetite or mental problems totaled 3,142, down from 3,392 in last year's survey.
However, 121 children were freshly recognized as needing special consideration, the survey showed.
Among the 3,142 children, 224 have experienced "flashbacks" of terror as well as extreme anxiety when hearing about other earthquakes, such as the powerful ones that hit Tottori Prefecture in October last year and Hiroshima and other areas in western Japan in March.
But 36.5 percent of the group chose "stress from the terror of quakes" as the third-highest cause of problems, down about 3 percentage points from last year.
"Relationships with family and friends" topped the list at 43.2 percent, while "change of residential environment" ranked second at 38.2 percent.
An education board official said, "A number of children still suffer from mental wounds, and environmental changes or other disasters may trigger new troubles for children."
Yoshiki Tominaga, professor of clinical psychology at Hyogo University of Teacher Education, said that 3,142 PTSD cases is a worrying number, given that high school students are not included in the survey.
The survey covered about 483,000 pupils in the prefecture and was completed on July 1. The education board has been conducting the annual survey on all public elementary and junior high school children in the prefecture since fiscal 1996.
The earthquake hit Kobe and its vicinity early in the morning on Jan. 17, 1995, resulting in the loss of more than 6,400 lives.