Disaster Mental Health Counseling

This book provides a unique resource guide with practical application for graduate students, counselor educators and supervisors, and mental health practitioners to prepare to meet the intense challenges of disaster response in the 21st century. Each section of the book defines, describes, and applies the knowledge, awareness, and skills to work in a variety of disaster mental health counseling scenarios. Considerations are given to working with a variety of different cultures and special populations. Chapters cover the medical aspects such as blast wounds, psychosocial adjustment issues such as chronic illnesses and disabilities (CIDs), career transitions and clinical interventions in disaster mental health counseling. Survivors of mass violence are at high risk for a wide range of psychiatric, neurobehavioral, and neurocognitive disorders as a result of experiencing extraordinary stressful and traumatic events. One of the chapters offers a description of the empathy fatigue construct as it relates to other professional fatigue syndromes, a recently developed tool, Global Assessment of Empathy Fatigue (GAEF). The book goes beyond the traditional counseling theories and interventions text in that it offers real-world functional assessments, explains culturally relevant interventions, and provides readers with a structured approach for healing trauma; the Personal Growth Program to Heal Trauma (PGP-HT).