Resilience and Risk Factors After Disaster Events PTSD: National Center for PTSD

Early experiences of trauma can leave a deep imprint on your worldview, sense of self, and relationships later in life. But it can also involve responses to repeated events, like ongoing emotional abuse or childhood neglect. Trauma refers to your response following an event that psychologically overwhelms you, often resulting in shock, denial, and changes in the body, mind, and behavior. Some in the medical community dispute what constitutes trauma.

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• Time and space allow some room to grieve, but in the meantime, avoid the news and constant chatter about the magnitude of the events and the disturbing scenes of others around you.
• Learning about trauma raises awareness about a widespread issue and empowers one with tools to help one heal oneself and others.
• Low socioeconomic status, prior traumas, poor education and the lack of a support network all contribute to increasing the risk of developing PTSD.
• The focus was to measure the scope and magnitude of the disaster on large populations across wide geographic areas, providing opportunities to explore the differential effect of disaster exposure type (direct vs. indirect) and their mental health consequences .

It is possible for PTSD to be successfully treated many years after the traumatic event occurred, which means it is never too late to seek help. Thankfully many people can go through their entire life never experiencing a natural disaster. While there’s no one “right” way to cope, there is a shared psychological response that all humans go through when faced with a natural disaster.

Social Isolation

Third, although psychological distress can dissipate with time, difficulties with adjustment often persist following disaster exposure. In summary, the link between disaster exposure and mental health impact can be broadly understood on three levels. Although this model is unique in the sense that it helps to understand both community response and individual response (within that community), the generalizability is limited (i.e., specific to developed nations) and does not consider the quality of post-disaster changes that might vary across communities, causing different outcomes. This finding not only suggests empirical support for the phases of disaster proposed by FEMA but also suggests that the model may have implications for disaster recovery program planning . For example, when community members of Slave Lake, Alberta, Canada, who experienced a devastating wildfire in 2011, were surveyed one year after the fire , they exhibited low levels of recovery and cohesion—findings that corroborate the FEMA model expectations for a community in the disillusionment phase of recovery. During the disaster impact phase (at the outset), various sub-events (e.g., displacement and injury) occur, and emphasis is placed on exerting control over what is occurring.

Lack of social support—or perceived barriers to it—has been shown to be related to worse recovery following disaster events (1,32,51-53). Continuing post-disaster stress and the need for people to rebuild their own lives may make it difficult for them to offer positive support to others. Specific to mass shootings, guilt and resentment, insecurity, anxiety sensitivity, beliefs that events are random and uncontrollable, pre-existing lack of social support, ruminative and avoidant coping styles, and punitive attitudes toward crime have all been found to increase risk for PTSD, depression, and anxiety disorders following these events (43-47). Demographic risk factors https://disasterphilanthropy.org/disasters/2025-us-tornadoes-and-severe-storms/ for adjustment problems and psychopathology following disaster events include poverty or low socioeconomic status, little previous experience in coping with these types of events, prior exposures to highly stressful experiences, prior history of mental disorders, and being aged 40 to 60, a woman, or non-white. Perception of health risk in chemical and radiological disasters increases risk for long-term anxiety and somatic symptoms, even in unexposed populations (24-27).

The key intuition here is that disasters can be devastating for some and not for others, and, when they are devasting, the misery can drag on for a long time and have a corrosive effect on the lives of the disaster-affected individuals, especially on their mental health. The direct experience with that disaster may be traumatic (e.g., escaping as the fire bears down, or almost drowning in the flood water) and as such can function as a source for PTSD or a PTSD-like reaction downstream. In the peri-disaster period, that is, during and immediately after a natural disaster event, the experience of the disaster can range from direct to indirect. From the transition perspective, we postulate that, in a broader sense, disaster mental health effects can be described in two stages—a peri-disaster stage and a post-disaster stage. Therefore, using the TIS across disaster mental health studies could potentially increase the robustness and comparability of the disaster studies.