Chapter 13 - Disaster: Mental Health Effects, Responses, and What Clinicians Can Do

Summary

Descriptions of disasters and their psychological impact as severe trauma on humans appear in ancient literature, such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and various religious texts. The historian Herodotus, in the sixth century BC, described a soldier who suffered from permanent blindness after he witnessed the death of a fellow soldier. More recently, soldiers who fought in the civil war suffered from a set of physical and emotional symptoms known as “Soldier’s Heart” or Da Costa’s syndrome, a possible predecessor of what we now refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder. While most disaster victims do not develop psychopathology, depending on the intensity and severity of the trauma, many survivors suffer from varying degrees of emotional problems. The common post-disaster psychiatric disorders are post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depression, and alcohol use disorder.1 Although disaster-related emotional traumas have been known for years, the clinical evaluation and treatment of these traumas within the disaster situation are relatively recent developments. Modern disaster psychiatry dates back to the 1942 “Cocoanut Grove” nightclub fire in Boston which killed 492 people and left a community in grief. Erich Lindeman,2 Stanley Cobb,3 and Alexander Adler4 published papers describing the psychiatric complications, symptomatology, and the management of acute grief related to this event.