Disaster Mental Health Counseling

Focuses on understanding cultural and psychosocial contexts to promote optimal healing for disaster survivors

This is the first book for mental health professionals working with survivors of mass trauma to focus on the psychosocial and culture contexts in which these disasters occur. It underscores the importance of understanding these environments in order to provide maximally effective mental health interventions for trauma survivors and their communities. Global in scope, the text addresses the foundations of understanding and responding to the mental health needs of individuals and groups healing from traumas created by a wide range of natural and human-made critical events, including acts of terrorism, armed conflict, genocide, and mass violence by individual perpetrators. Designed for professional training in disaster mental health, and meeting CACREP standards, the text promotes the knowledge and skills needed to work with the psychosocial aspects of individual and group adaptation and adjustment to mass traumatic experience.

Reflecting state-of-the-art knowledge, the book offers detailed guidelines in assessment and brief interventions related to survivors’ posttraumatic stress symptoms and complex trauma associated with being at the epicenter of extraordinary stressful and traumatic events. In addition, this book also covers critical issues of self-care for the professional. Illustrated with first-person accounts of disaster survivors and case scenarios, this book emphasizes how counselors and other mental health professionals can foster resilience and wellness in individuals and communities affected by all types of disasters.

Key Features:Considers disaster and mass trauma response from a culturally and globally relevant perspective—the first book of its kindAddresses CACREP’s clinical standards and content areas related to disaster mental health response Covers many types of disasters and categories of survivorsIncludes updated information on PTSD, complex trauma, and self-careAddresses cultivating resiliency in individual and group survivors along with social justice issues