Behavioral Health Response to Disasters

''Foreword Behavioral Health Response to Disasters Disaster behavioral health has come a long way in a short amount of time. The book you hold in your hands (or perhaps view on your Kindle e-reader) encompasses an array of topics almost unimaginable even 25 years ago. It covers the roles and responsibilities of government and nongovernmental organizations and the integration of behavioral health into public health preparedness and response. There are separate chapters on children, adolescents, older adults, and racially and ethnically diverse populations. Other chapters address secondary trauma in disaster workers and assessing local disaster vulnerability. The list goes on, including dealing with school systems, long-term care, behavioral health in shelters, treatment for disaster survivors, disaster substance abuse services, culturally competent case management, response team training, and building community resilience. A simple perusal of the table of contents serves as an illustration of the way that attention to disaster behavioral health has grown exponentially in research, policy, and practice communities. It was not always so. When I began graduate training in the mid 1980s, to my knowledge disaster mental health was not part of any graduate school curriculum. A small subset of clinical psychologists and other mental health professionals had some training in crisis mental health, but it was optional, and it carried a different and much more specifi c meaning. Crisis mental health in those days typically meant: (1) working with people who were in acute crisis, (2) working with victims of extreme circumstances using models derived from the military and trauma research, and/or (3) community crisis intervention''--