A community vision that incorporates elements of sustainability and resilience ensures that recovery goes beyond mere restoration of pre-disaster conditions. Such planning might include developing centralized databases that detail at-risk areas, emergency response measures, and resources available for both immediate relief and long-term recovery. These experiences underscore the indispensable role that well-managed financial resources play in ensuring comprehensive physical and economic recovery from natural disasters. This preemptive approach includes creating comprehensive community-wide recovery plans that encompass all essential services, such as health, housing, and economic stability.
- Our national approach to disasters is in need of improvement, but to meet the scale of the challenge, we need to think more systematically, more strategically, and, yes, more naturally about disaster response and risk reduction.
- Depression and prolonged grief in the wake of disasters.
- NCDP sees a link between its mission in disaster preparedness and its commitment to protect the well-being of children, the disabled, the frail elderly, and others who are often left behind in disaster planning.
- Disasters can have a profound and lasting impact on the psychological well-being of those affected.
- A recurrent problem that has been cited by many authors is the lack of a clear definition of resilience 13,14.
2.1. Alternative model
(5) Expand the geography of disaster response and relief to better incorporate the displacement of affected people. Unfortunately, most plans do not address directly major drivers of long-term disaster impacts on humans—that is, acute, chronic, and cumulative stress—and therefore do less to enhance resilience than they could. Disasters are a recurring fact of life, and major incidents can have both immediate and long-lasting negative effects on the health and well-being of people, communities, and economies. Future community resilience research would benefit from incorporating geographical and physical indicators of community-level factors supporting resilience.
This was mentioned in several papers, especially by Chandra and colleagues22 where the authors suggested training https://www.futurity.org/mental-health-providers-covid-19-2351902-2/ “partners and lay health advisors in proper risk communication techniques (p. 20).” Another suggestion was that government officials “should consider community norms and the range of individual beliefs (p. 21)” when crafting risk messages22 to ensure that the messages address the expectations of community members and are placed in an appropriate social context to help the public understand them22,24. This recent international treaty emphasises specific outcomes and priorities related to disaster risk reduction to be achieved by 2030, such as, “the substantial reduction of disaster risk and losses in lives, livelihoods and health in the economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental assess of persons, businesses, communities and countries (p. 12)”11. Predictors of individual mental health and psychological resilience after Australia’s 2019–2020 bushfires.
2. Structural model: the indirect effect of resource loss
According to Kubala, resilience should be examined longitudinally (aka across time or across a chunk of someone’s life). As a 2011 research article notes, there’s a dynamic nature to resilience across the lifespan. A 2009 research article defines resilience as a process and describes the term as the “development of competence despite severe or pervasive adversity.”
In general, across a wide range of disasters, the findings indicated an improvement in PTSD symptoms following a high-impact disaster (e.g., between the first few months and 12 months or more), but the prevalence rates of depression and anxiety tend to remain stable over time rather than showing attenuation 18,27,130,134,135. For instance, a cross-sectional study surveying individuals displaced from their homes following the 2016 wildfires in Fort McMurray found that, 12 months following the event, the prevalence rate of depressive symptoms was around 15% . The rate of depression ranged between 5.8% and 54%, whilst the manifestation of depression symptoms was found to be between one month and 48 months after natural disasters 113,114. After PTSD, depression is the second-most prevalent and commonly studied mental health problem in disaster populations 3,27,37. For example, a cross-sectional survey on the 2017 earthquake in Mexico revealed that, after 2 months following the quake, 36.4% indicated symptoms consistent with PTSD, with an increased risk found in women, those who had their home damaged, and individuals with pre-existing mental conditions . As mentioned before, PTSD is regarded as the signature psychopathology of disaster mental health consequences 3,52,101,102.
Of the total number that occur globally each year, communities have viewed very few oil spill as disasters„ e.g., the Exxon Valdez, DWH, and Hebei Spirit oil spills. Inclusion and/or greater emphasis could occur at the national level (e.g., via FEMA’s National Preparedness Plan and National Response Framework2), where childhood trauma related to disasters is already mentioned and supported3 and encouraged for consideration at state and local levels. It would be helpful if there was greater standardization in the collection of psychological and physiological data, both pre- and post-disaster.