Geriatric Mental Health Disaster and Emergency Preparedness

7
Making the Community
Plan: A Public Health
Perspective
ANDREA VILLANTI
DISASTERS: A COMMUNITY-LEVEL EVENT
Disasters are events that “seriously [disrupt] the functioning of a community
or society and [cause] human, material, and economic or environmental
losses that exceed the community ’s or society ’s ability to cope using its
own resources” (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
Societies, 2008a). While disaster research has focused on the impact of personal
loss, property damage, and individual trauma, community destruction
may also result in a collective trauma with broad public health implications
(Norris, 2002). Research on disasters has shown the community-level impact
of these destructive events on mental health across the life span (Galea,
et al., 2002; Galea, Tracy, Norris, & Coffey, 2008; Norris, Friedman, &
Watson, 2002; Norris, Friedman, Watson, et al., 2002; Thompson, Norris,
& Hanacek, 1993) as well as the ways individuals turn to their communities
to cope (Schuster, et al., 2001).
In 2004, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
Societies focused their annual World Disasters Report on community
resilience, asserting that disaster preparedness and response should adopt
the sustainable livelihoods framework central to international development
work (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
Societies, 2004). The report argued that shifting the risk approach by
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