Supporting one another post flood

The flood waters are slowly residing to reveal the extent of damage to property, personal belongings, and loved ones including pets.  Enormous loss is experienced on all levels, for the individual, family and communities affected. Impacts of natural disasters are usually felt at two separate impact times.  The first is the physical impact of the task before us, the clean up, insurance claims, replacing property, grieving over lost items, photos, pets.  The first impact is generally a call to action, people busy themselves doing what they can to have a productive impact on recovering from the disaster. 

Professor Richard Bryant, a Psychologist, APS Fellow, Director of the Traumatic Stress Unit at Westmead Hospital, and internationally renowned disaster expert encourages counsellors to take a more supportive and less “traditionally therapeutic” approach post disasters.  Trauma experts recommend a common sense approach to support people, reduce arousal, calm people down and assist with problem solving.  The time for debriefing and therapeutic intervention is during the second impact time, when life has started to settle down post disaster, and not all people will need this. 

For most people the physical activity of getting in there, problem solving and cleaning up the mess will reduce symptoms of distress over a 3 month period.  This applies to those vicariously impacted by the flood also.  By getting in there and assisting physically with the clean up, we help ourselves also by reducing trauma symptoms and feelings of helplessness. 

For those providing support, a listening ear or counselling post flooding the following may assist:

Skills for assisting Psychological Recovery: (Professor Bryant, 2010)

1. Information gathering: The first step, help identify and prioritise peoples needs, develop an action plan with your client to help tackle the problems.
2. Problem solving: Often clients do not have highly developed problem solving skills and this is a huge need following disasters, you can assist in problem solving technique  and strategy.
3. Activity scheduling: It is well known in the depression literature that the best intervention is behavioural.  Getting people up and doing things is likely to have the biggest effect.
4. Managing stress reactions: It is important to teach people how to reduce arousal,  as arousal in an acute phase is a predictor of later PTSD or anxiety disorders.  Support clients in developing techniques eg. Breathing techniques, self talk. 
5. Healthy thinking: Peoples interpretation of an event is predictive of how they are going to cope.  Teach clients how to recognise unhelpful thoughts and practice more helpful ones.
6. Social support: Assist clients to proactively engage or build social networks and maintain those already established.  Those with good social networks tend to fare better following a disaster.

These tips are taken from the 2010 Annual Oration of the Australian Psychological Society, given by Professor Bryant.  The audio file and slides are available at www.psychology.org.au/news/news_updates