Aid Organizations Seen Slow to Deliver Mental Health Support Services

Filling a Need — Um, Now What?

In the days and weeks following the earthquake and tsunami which struck the Indian Ocean in December 2004, several different organizations highlighted the acute or longer term risks to mental health posed by the disaster. Press releases bemoaned the lack of trained professionals available to work with those affected by the disaster while, in private, some organizations expressed an urgent need for specific types of support (e.g., experienced professionals willing to travel to an affected area to help train local personnel). Against this backdrop, I’ve been surprised to find that when offered a database of a couple of hundred volunteers willing to help (“International Effort to Offer Volunteer Counselling or Therapy Support to Those Affected by Tsunami”), complete with full details of background and capabilities and language skills and so forth, most organizations have seemed woefully ill-equipped to figure out what to do with them — or, at least, they haven’t seemed especially speedy at doing anything with the resources offered.

Whatever the particular details of a situation with a given organization, I often feel as if someone has shouted "hey, I really need some X", and I’ve said "OK, here’s some X; where would you like it?"…and then everything gets very very slow.

I really do appreciate that aid organizations and NGOs of the type involved in providing tsunami relief and support have their hands full delivering all kinds of services to those affected by the disaster. The British public alone has donated nearly half a billion dollars to the relief effort, and that must take some significant management skill and serious logistics experience to utilize efficiently. But at the same time, it’s not that making use of volunteers is an entirely alien activity for such organizations: after all, this is one of the things they do! And while I also appreciate that providing the basics like clean drinking water and medical facilities takes priority over attending to mental health needs, it is many of the aid organizations themselves which issued press releases highlighting the need for more mental health professionals!

Utilizing Things vs. Utilizing People

Even though one might have thought that making use of volunteers would be a real forté of international aid organizations, my recent experience leaves me wondering whether this is always the case.

From my outside perspective, it appears that many aid organizations are especially skilled at the logistics of things which can be stockpiled in warehouses and then moved to a specific geographical location. They also seem well equipped to handle money, which can be used very efficiently to purchase needed food, materials and services at a point much closer to where they will actually be used. But they seem less well equipped to utilize actual human resources — individual human beings who offer themselves as part of the relief effort.

Likewise, the logistical skills of aid organizations seem especially well honed for handling the needs of a specific geographical area, as distinct from addressing the needs of a potentially geographically dispersed group of people. One example of what I mean by a geographically dispersed group of people would be foreign travellers who lost loved ones in the disaster but themselves survived and returned to their home countries — or even people within affected countries who were themselves safely distant from the disaster but yet lost friends or relatives to it.

Is My Experience Representative?

I very much hope that my experience in attempting to offer assistance to aid organizations is utterly non-representative. I hope that no one else has any idea what I’m talking about!

But if it at all indicates a general feature of how aid organizations respond to offers of exactly the kind of assistance they themselves have publicly requested, then I would urge the folks in charge to consider how they could make better use of responses to their public appeals. There are, as of this writing, around 200 mental health professionals in our database, willing to help.

Most of them are still waiting.

Are You From an Organization Delivering Mental Health Services?

If you are from an aid organization in need of mental health professionals for tsunami disaster relief, please get in touch via our Contact Pages.

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