Tsunami Mental Health Support: Lessons From the First Week

It has now been around one week since our call for volunteers (“International Effort to Offer Volunteer Counselling or Therapy Support to Those Affected by Tsunami”) willing to provide support to those affected by the tsunami, and I’d like to thank all of those who have responded. With volunteers from 10 countries, we have now recorded offers of well over 2000 hours of time. Large organizations such as the BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy), with some 22,000 members, have thrown their weight behind the effort, and I believe we’ve achieved good momentum for building a great resource for those in need.

As of right now, we are still building our database and are liasing with several aid agencies in hopes of making the most effective use of your kind offers. I’d like to share with you some of what I’ve learned over the last week about the challenges this involves…

For those who have volunteered to provide services on the ground in affected countries, I have learned that many aid agencies will work only with professionals who can point to a great deal of prior experience with natural disasters or other trauma work, preferably experience of at least 10 years and preferably with the same specific agency concerned. This is because once an agency agrees to accept your services, they take themselves as being responsible for your personal safety and well-being — and this can be very expensive indeed unless you are virtually autonomous, able to make most of your own arrangements, and able to operate with little or no involvement from the host agency. This needn’t necessarily mean that it will be impossible to connect you with agencies that can make use of your time — and in fact I know that some of you *do* have very extensive prior experience working on the ground in affected areas — but I wanted to let you know about this initial cautionary feedback I’ve received.

For those who have volunteered to provide services remotely, via telephone, email or chat, I’ve also learned that most of the existing mental health support infrastructure for handling natural disasters and other emergency events seems to be geared toward providing services quickly to one specific geographic area. The nature of this disaster, of course, is that not only have so many been affected around the Indian Ocean, but many have also been affected around the world in other countries — tourists and travellers, friends and family of those in the region, etc. Therefore, I believe there is certainly a need for professionals able to reach people all over the world using technology. But the prevailing paradigm of “one disaster, one location” significantly complicates the job of connecting individual mental health professionals with agencies able to make effective use of their time.

All of this suggests that we cannot by any means guarantee that we’ll be able to find ways to make immediate and effective use of every hour that has so far been volunteered.

Nonetheless, our efforts will certainly continue to locate agencies and individuals in need! In addition, interested mental health professionals may like to register details individually at the following site, which serves as a clearing house for other agencies seeking specific types of expertise and availability: CIDI.

Just click on ‘Register Offers of Goods or Service’ and complete the ‘Technical Assistance’ form. The site also provides other additional background information about what is typically required of volunteers.

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