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How Mental Health Shapes Recovery After a Disaster

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A new study finds links between pre-disaster mental health and recovery.

Posted July 1, 2021 | Reviewed by Chloe Williams

When disaster strikes, people’s lives are changed in unexpected and unprecedented ways. Natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods, man-made disasters such as terrorist attacks and chemical warfare, and public health disasters such as the COVID-19 pandemic all cause individuals to suffer in a myriad of ways for which they are often unprepared.

Read the article in Psychology Today.

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Density Is Normally Good for Us. That Will Be True After Coronavirus, Too.

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The very thing that has made cities vulnerable in a pandemic has protected them in other disasters.

March 24, 2020 By Emily Badger

Study cited in NY Times

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Can natural disasters facilitate growth for their survivors?

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Findings from the RISK Project suggest that post-traumatic growth (PTG) was evident in five different key areas for most of the low-income survivors that participated in the study. Read more

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You’ve heard of post-traumatic stress, but what about post-traumatic growth?

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It’s the flip side: the deep psychological health that emerges surprisingly often when people have a close brush with a disaster like Hurricane Florence.

written by the RISK Project Principal Investigators, Jean Rhodes and Mary Waters.

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The health dangers don’t stop with a hurricane’s churning. They can get worse.

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The health dangers don’t stop with a hurricane’s churning. They can get worse.

By William Wan ,Lena H. Sun and Carolyn Y. Johnson
September 17

In coming weeks, long after Hurricane Florence’s winds and rains have faded, its aftermath will still pose life-threatening hazards: snakes, submerged sharp objects, bacterial infections and disease-carrying mosquitoes.

 

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More than 12 years after Hurricane Katrina, scientists are learning what makes some survivors more resilient than others

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More than 12 years after Hurricane Katrina, scientists are learning what makes some survivors more resilient than others

Science Magazine, February 27, 2018

What natural disaster survivors can teach all of us about resilience and optimism

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http://www.health.com/stress/post-traumatic-growth

Rhodes recently spoke with Health about her research on Hurricane Katrina survivors, and about the field of post-traumatic grief in general. Here’s how she thinks it can inform our response to natural disasters and the support we provide to victims, as well as what survivors can do to increase their likelihood of recovery and resilience.