World Mental Health Day Highlights Hidden Trauma After Natural Disasters

We’re still in the hurricane season and in the immediate aftermath of a hurricane or any natural disaster, it’s easy to count collapsed structures, flooded homes, damaged roads—but the invisible wounds carried in people’s hearts and minds often go unnoticed. These events can worsen mental health and psychosocial conditions. Today, World Mental Health Day is an opportune time to consider how tragedies affect one’s mental health in order to devise ways to cope.

Dr. Karen Roberts, Technical Advisor mental health at PAHO, Belize reminds us that we must learn coping skills to protect our mental health.

Dr. Karen Roberts, Technical Advisor, Mental Health, PAHO: “As parents, we make all the decisions for children.  And as a result, there’s some things we don’t let them learn by trial and error; in the case where you want to make sure that the error is not too costly for them.  But sometimes children need to learn that if you don’t do this, there are consequences and as a result, it’s the same thing.  If we don’t get certain kinds of experiences, we will never know how to manage. If you’ve never been in a stressful situation, it’s difficult to know how you would cope.  And let’s say if you’ve been in stressful situation, the first time you might not have managed it very well, sweating and things like that. But then after it happens next week, then it happens the other week, and then you realize, look, this is not so bad after all.  We recall on past ways of coping.  And as a result, we were able to put those same kinds of things into practice.”

Roberts cautions that as a society resilient individuals are a must.

Dr. Karen Roberts, Technical Advisor, Mental Health, PAHO: If a child  is not put in a situation  where they’re challenged to  behave in a certain way,  they’re not exposed to certain kinds of content,  they’re not exposed to certain kinds of material  to read where they could grow and understand and so on,  you find that many times,  or  on the other hand,  if they find themselves in stressful situations and are not challenged  to learn to develop like coping skills. self-care skills and so on, you find that those people um take a longer time to develop because they haven’t really experienced those actual situations in terms of being able to learn how to deal with it, and sometimes we say practice makes perfect.  You don’t constantly have to be in a stressful situation to be able to master coping skills, but then if you’re not in situations where the coping skills are challenged, then you really don’t know how you would respond.  So, I would say it’s not only with age, but then  it also has to do with life experiences, your exposure, past things that you’ve been involved in, being able to observe to how another person has managed and scoped and so on.  Those factors in combination help people to mature.”

World Mental Health Day is being observed under the theme: “Access to Service: Mental Health in Catastrophes and Emergencies”.