Resolving Disaster Trauma with Emerging Rapid Relief Interventions and Resilience Therapies

Building resilience is a deliberate process, as resilience is fundamentally a learned set of behaviors. Somatic neurobiological interventions teach resilience-building therapies to individuals in such a way that takes a devastating disaster event and turns into into a point of personal mitigation and strengthening, both to recover from and to resist impact of future distressing events.  

Disaster Trauma is best understood as a neurobiological ”injury" that responds better to rapid interventions than by traditional talk-therapy models of care.  Current approaches to Psychological First Aid (PFA) and Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) have received critique validated by practitioners working with disaster survivors as they. As evidence-based research into emerging neurobiological and somatic interventions advances, an array of new methods to treat Disaster Trauma is available as a supplemental complement to existing systems of crisis intervention. A convergence of the treatment methods studied can be synthesized and taught to survivors to be self-administered, thereby increasing the utility and availability of this type of care. We present research into 15+ modalities and their applied benefit to disaster survivors as a convergent option for post-disaster community care.

Integration of these methods into community recovery programs could reduce the increase in suicide, stress related illness, unemployment, domestic violence, depression, PTSD, or other stress related conditions that compound in the months and years after a catastrophic event, as evidence-based trials that reveal a high degree of effectiveness for alternative and somatic approaches in post-disaster treatment.  

Keywords: Disaster Trauma, Behavioral health, Community interventions, Resilience,  CISM, Complementary and Alternative Medicine, CAM, Resilience Therapies

 

¹ Enhancing Disaster Resilience by Reducing Stress-Associated Health Impacts Paul A. Sandifer, Ann Hayward Walker, Front Public Health. 2018; 6: 373. Published online 2018 Dec 21. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2018.00373, PMCID: PMC6309156

² Barnett, J. E., & Shale, A. J. (2012). The integration of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) into the practice of psychology: A vision for the future. Professional Psychology: Research & Practice, 43(6), 576-585. 

³ Rossouw, The Late Pieter. (2015). Resilience - A Neurobiological perspective. Neuropsychotherapy in Australia. 31. 3-8. 

⁴ Collinge, W., Wentworth, R., & Sabo, S. (2005). Integrating complementary therapies into community mental health practice: an exploration. Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine, 11(3), 569-574. doi: 10.1089/acm.2005.11.569 

⁵ Brunello N, Davidson J, Deahl M, et al. Post-traumatic stress disorder: diagnosis and epidemiology, comorbidity and social consequences, biology and treatment. Neuropsychobiology 2001;43:150-62.

⁶ Buckley T, Kaloupek D. A meta-analytic examination of basal cardiovascular activity in post-traumatic stress disorder. Psy-chosom Med 2001;63:585–94.

⁷ See Robert D. Macy, et. al., Community-Based, Acute Post-traumatic Stress Management: A Description and Evaluation of a Psychosocial-Intervention Continuum; Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Issue # 12.4, Taylor & Francis, September 2004

⁸ McNally RJ, Bryant RA, Ehlers A. Does early psychological intervention promote recovery from posttraumatic stress? Psychol Sci Public Interest 2003;4:45–79. 

⁹ Rose B, Bisson J, Wessely S. Psychological debriefing for preventing post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Cochrane Review). Cochrane Library 2001(3). 

¹⁰ Gregerson, M. B. J. (2007). Creativity enhances practitioners' resiliency and effectiveness after a hometown disaster. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 38(6), 596.

¹¹ Norris, F. H., & Elrod, C. L. (2006). Psychosocial consequences of disaster. Methods for disaster mental health research, 20-42.

 

 

 

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