When you’re the driver of the truck at the heart of a tangled mess of steel and glass in which a life has been lost, platitudes have an empty ring.

Despite well-meaning words of comfort, you know everything is not, in fact, fine. A life has been lost. And as you replay in your mind the last few seconds prior to the crash, you can’t help but ask some difficult and painful questions. For some, those questions never go away.

“Of all crashes, maybe 20% result in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,” says Gerry Smith, vice-president of organizational health at Toronto-based Warren Shepell & Associates. His firm offers employee-assistance program (EAP) services, including group and individual counseling. In this post-September-11 world, more companies are relying on such services to make sure their workers can function after a traumatic event.

Smith says symptoms of post-traumatic stress can prompt truck drivers involved in a serious crash to hang up the keys. Whether they’ll ever again be able to drive professionally depends on how they learn to cope with what they’ve been through.

“I knew one trucker who was off for about six months before she could even consider getting back into a truck,” he says. “Once she got behind the wheel, she realized she couldn’t drive truck anymore.”

Bob Halfyard, manager of driver relations and training for Challenger Motor Freight in Cambridge, Ont., says fleets need to have a strategy in place to help drivers deal with the aftermath of a serious crash. “Knock on wood, we’ve been fortunate and not had to deal with this too often,” he says. “But when you’ve got 800-some trucks on the road and you look at the traffic stats, it’s inevitable that you’ll face it some day.”

His company’s policy is to get help on the scene as soon as possible. The company takes care of getting the vehicle moving again-all the pressure comes off the driver immediately. Unfortunately, the situation can be complicated if the accident happens far from home. It’s imperative that a driver have someone to lean on. If it can’t be his family, it should be his company.

This notion of reaching out to drivers after a traumatic event is relatively new, says Halfyard.

“I can think back 20 years ago when there was no such thing as counseling after a huge trauma or tragedy. You were just expected to suck it up and get over it. It was just part of the job.” These days it’s understood that the sooner drivers get help after the accident, the more likely they’ll be able to recover emotionally and be able to get behind the wheel again.

Halfyard says one of his own drivers needed a lot of work and patience to get back into the driver’s seat. “We actually started out in a normal passenger car, and worked our way up to driving a small truck, to a tractor without a trailer, to, finally, a tractor-trailer on a 10-mile drive, a 20-mile drive, a 50-mile drive… We worked through it and got him back on the road. Once they get past a certain point, they’re fine,” he says.

But getting past that point can be tough.

“If you’re in a fatal accident, whether it was your fault or not, you second guess yourself and wonder if you’d done something differently, would that person still be alive,” Halfyard explains.

Smith believes crashes are traumatic for professional drivers because so much of their identity revolves around their life on the road. “They’re truckers. Their job is to get from A to B safely. And when they’re in an accident, they haven’t accomplished their raison d’etre,” he says.

Traumatized drivers can experience a range of reactions. Even if they haven’t been hurt physically, they can have phantom aches and pains, sleeplessness, and appetite changes. Drivers might feel anger for allowing themselves to get into this kind of predicament, says Smith. “Even if it’s not their fault, they’ll have an emotional response which would generally begin with anger and lead to denial, frustration, confusion, self-loathing, guilt, and resentment.”

A driver who allows himself to constantly give in to grief can become self-destructive. “Grief can turn into depression,” Smith says. “Once depression hits, it can be months before there’s any kind of recovery.” In the one-on-one therapy that follows a serious crash, Smith says counselors examine five areas for a clue to where the driver may be getting hung up.

The severity of the crash.

The duration of the incident. The longer and more complex it was, the more opportunities there would have been for psychological trauma.

The predictability of the accident. The more sudden or out-of-the-blue the accident was, the more intense the trauma tends to be.

Intent. Was it just tragic timing, or the consequence of poor driving, or a case of road rage, or suicide? The greater the level of intention, the more difficult the accident is to understand.

The state-of-mind of the driver at the time of the accident. Were there personal issues, or some other kind of psychological baggage that would make this more difficult to recover from?

Smith says there’s often value in offering group counseling to others in the company who might be affected by the incident. Other drivers may benefit from talking about what their reactions were.

Counseling resources are generally available through EAP providers. A list of Canadian and American companies offering employee assistance programs is available on the web site of the Employee Assistance Society of North America, at www.easna.org/memberdirect.htm.

Although he estimates that about one in five people who experience a serious accident will develop some signs of post-traumatic stress, Smith says the good news is that most recover fairly quickly. “Once they’re made aware of tips and strategies for coping, most people recover well on their own. The unsuccessful cases are few and far between.”

The key is to get help on the scene as quickly as possible… and then be patient.

“People bounce back,” he says.