But what happens to these people next? Do they typically experience a decrease mental health and wellness? Or is the human condition typically one of resilience?
Research generally finds that approximately two-thirds of people affected by natural disasters, health crises, and terrorist attacks show resilience. They maintain a stable level of mental health in the face of a serious stressor.
However, some people experience prolonged distress after floods and other disasters. These individuals often face other life challenges and have thin support networks, and should not be overlooked in policy responses and supports.
People respond to disasters in four main forms
Studies often identify four types of psychological response to disasters and crises such as floods.
The first group, which includes about two-thirds of people, has a resilient response.
They may have temporary increases in feelings of loss, sadness, fear, and worry when the disaster happens first. But in two months they return to their usual level of psychological well-being.
The second group of people experience great psychological distress during the time of the disaster and beyond, and show little or no recovery.
The third group shows no change in psychological well-being for months, but then experiences increased distress that can continue to increase for up to two years.
The fourth group experiences a large increase in psychological distress during and immediately after the disaster. These people show gradual decreases in distress until their psychological well-being is restored. However, this can take many months, if not years.
Who falls into which category?
Identifying the types of people who fall into these four psychological responses has proven extremely difficult, as no single major factor can explain people’s psychological well-being during and after disaster.
Instead, it is the combination of a variety of risk and protective factors that predicts whether a person is resilient, struggles with a more gradual recovery, or develops long-lasting mental health problems.
These factors also change over time as people’s life circumstances change. This means that people may be more or less resilient at different times in their lives, which can influence how disaster affects them.
What are resilience and risk factors?
Three types of factors help predict resilience: personal characteristics, family relationships, and community characteristics.
Personal characteristics include personality traits such as feelings of loneliness, optimism, neuroticism, the ability to control emotions, as well as gender, age, cultural background, and a history of mental health problems.
Family relationship factors include how relationships work, perceived support from partner and parents, constructive communication, feelings of closeness, and trust.
Community characteristics include the level of social cohesion in the community, crime rates, disaster exposure, and other factors such as wealth.
How do they get together?
To show how these factors come together to predict people’s psychological responses to disasters like floods, let’s use two examples.
People who are psychologically resilient tend to be optimistic, demonstrate little neuroticism, and have few existing mental health problems. They are often (but not always) of higher socioeconomic status.
They also tend to have very supportive family relationships that are close and include constructive ways of communicating about problems.
These people tend to live in communities with high cohesion and solidarity.
People who experience chronic mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress, tend to lack optimism, may have a higher level of neuroticism, and have a history of mental health problems and past trauma.
Their distress is greater if they experience troubled family relationships, where conflict increases and there is little support between family members.
Chronic mental health problems can be further exacerbated in communities of lower socioeconomic status and where there is little cohesion.
How should policy responses consider well-being?
Disaster response efforts typically focus on two areas.
The first is to provide tangible assistance. This includes rescue efforts, cleaning up disaster-affected areas, and helping those affected access food, financial aid, temporary shelter, or housing.
This type of disaster response can also include providing advice and information that help people and their communities access the services they need.
The second focuses on assessing and providing counseling to those experiencing post-traumatic stress.
But if you focus on post-traumatic stress, you may miss out on providing mental health and relationship counseling to those who are at elevated risk, but may not show immediate signs of distress.
We need to expand the way we screen people in disaster-affected areas and do a much better job of identifying those who are likely to be resilient and those who are likely to be at risk.
As part of that assessment, it is necessary to understand the level of community cohesion and capacities in the areas affected by the disaster.
This is important because the distribution of aid and services can be counterproductive and cause further distress and further fracture in the community.
This can happen if the allocation of resources is not transparent, the timing and manner of aid distribution are not well understood, and the aid provided is not considered fair or culturally sensitive.
It is important to adopt a community-centered approach to post-disaster intervention. This requires governments, aid organizations and local authorities to work closely with each community to ensure that the community itself has an active role and voice in disaster recovery.
(This is a PTI story distributed through The Conversation)
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