Community Corner

Changed by 9/11: Dr. Clarissa Bullitt, Clinical Psychiatrist

Bullitt was riding a New York City subway when the attacks happened.

Dr. Clarissa Bullitt remembers Sept. 11, 2001 clearly. It was her children's first day of school, and she was taking a subway train on her way from Brooklyn to Manhattan to teach at Columbia University when the towers collapsed.

"People from the towers were racing onto the train," she said, "and they were covered in ash and in a state of complete trauma."

She got to Columbia, but turned around to come home. She managed to get across the East River, but then had to walk down through Queens and home to Brooklyn – where many people wound up after fleeing lower Manhattan. She saw the Brooklyn Bridge swaying under the weight of the thousands of people crossing the bridge to find safety.

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Bullitt, who has lived in Setauket since 2008 and now works at Stony Brook University, returned to Manhattan as soon as she could: not to go to work, but to help out at St. Vincent's Hospital. She volunteered for about 72 hours as an intermediary between families searching for loved ones and the remains that were recovered at Ground Zero – the victims whose remains had been taken to St. Vincent's. She helped the mayor's office set up services for Brooklyn's large Muslim community for fear that there would be a backlash against them.

"As long as I was in that office ... I was OK. In fact, I felt lucky," she said. "Everybody at that time wanted to be able to do something, and there was so little that could be done. I felt fortunate to be able to do something."

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Her children, now 13 and 16, remember that day – even the younger one, Bullitt said. And for herself, she said she gained perspective on the things that really matter in life.

"Often for people who went through it ... it’s just devastation," she said. "But there were moments of great beauty and intimacy and power and love and hopefulness about the human race within it."


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