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Victims of disasters are affected in
many ways, and while they may recover from the physical disability
suffered, the psychological scars usually remain for ever. A Disaster
is very often experienced as a violation of the innocence of
everydayness destroying faith in life itself and leaving the survivor
with a cruel reminder of his helplessness. The loss of faith that life
is predictable deals a devastating blow causing a disconnect with self
leading to despair. Survival is about more than just not dying, and
the psychological and social scars from disasters can even become
trans-generational. The central problem is the quality of life that
the victims can now hope for. The victims, survivors have to process
the feelings, give a meaning to the events, and transform event, and
experience to regain faith.
Recognising that mental health must be part of any disaster plan,
psycho-social care has become an integral part of health services in
disaster management. Immediate psycho social support involves
emotional triage and provision of comfort, information and support to
the victims, to the relatives and crisis counselling activities. The
initial pro-active contact, usually by several type of organizations,
ambulances and rescue services, voluntary agencies, Red Cross etc,
government organizations, mental health, social services, all provide
a supportive and holding environment. The victim responds very
positively to these interventions in the initial and intermediate
stages, on account of the individual coping mechanisms which kick in
aggressively in an attempt to normalise the individual’s status to
life and living.
The real agony starts much later, when the responders scale down their
intervention efforts, or otherwise withdraw, leaving it to outreach
programmes such as community support groups or self help groups to
provide psychological support. Later even these outreach programmes
gradually downsize and eventually fade away completely, leaving the
victim alone with the ghosts of the past. It is here that the
communities’ social systems can work great results. Indians have been
found to be much better at coping - both individually and in a group -
with psychological stress and trauma, than others. This is because of
the strong social system. That victims of disasters need involvement
with the community along with psychiatric help was one of the
recommendations of the core group on Medical Preparedness and Mass
Casualties Management (MPMCM) that met in Chandigarh on 13 Dec 06.Like
all recommendations, it is theoretically correct, but does not attempt
to probe deeper. Where are the communities in India? Or for that
matter in any country? Integrated communities exist mainly in the
rural and sub urban India, whereas urban regions are categorized by
segmented and marginalised societies and families. Greater research
and study is required to differentiate between the psycho-social needs
of victims in areas with well knit community and social networks as
against those in areas, like cities and metros, which really do not
have any community system.
An area that needs to be explored is online social networking, which
is possibly the largest growing system in the urban world. With the
web replacing the real world and real systems and real space, millions
of people are getting hooked to the web for emotional support and
help. Today the youth (and so also a larger growing population of
older people) prefer chatting with surrogate friends online rather
than with own family members and kith and kin. While one may debate
the erosion in social values this is causing, one cannot ignore the
fact the trend is here to stay and will increase. People will develop
relationships in the electronic environment, and we need to harness
this new social development.
Web based social networks and groups function in many ways similar to
offline social networks. Self help networks such as www.mentalhelp.net,
http://forum.psychlinks.ca, etc have over thousands of members and get
thousands hit a day. These online forums provide emotional support and
help to online members or visitors coping with a host of
psychological, mental and social problems ranging from anxiety
disorders, psychological and psychiatric issues, moods, anger
management, parenting, eating disorders, addiction and compulsive
behaviour, parenting, personality disorders, interpersonal
relationships etc.
Disaster management professionals should focus on harnessing naturally
occurring web-based social networks, such as MySpace, Wikipedia,
YouTube etc, similar to offline social networks, for online social
support of victims, besides sharing information and survival tips. Or
may be a web new service could be started. Already web services are
being used for dialing emergency services when a disaster strikes,
because emergency call centers quickly get overwhelmed. People access
the site and receive vital updates from the authorities while also
sharing information with one another. These need to be extended for
online psycho- social care. Web-based online forums and social
networks can provide lasting psycho-social care and social networking
especially for urbanised individuals to deliver assistance.
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