Confronting the Realities of Volunteering for a National Disaster

Abstract

Responding to a national appeal for mental health volunteers to assist with disaster relief efforts is an altruistic act. However, the reality of the actual work of a mental health volunteer can be jarring. In the course of providing services to traumatized individuals, mental health providers are in a position to share the emotional burden of the trauma, become a witness to the damage, recognize the realities of dealing with federal and state agencies, and observe the inequitable distribution of resources. The following is my story of what it was like before, during, and after my experience as a mental health volunteer in the Gulfport/Biloxi, Mississippi area two months after the destruction of August 2005. I hope that sharing my story will encourage other mental health counselors to play a role in responding to the needs created by events like Hurricane Katrina.

Beyond choice: ‘Thick’ volunteering and the case of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution

“…Relatedly, it is not that thick volunteering is only, or even specifically, associated with danger. Rather, the point is that danger offers one particular basis for the thickness of volunteering (as also in Lois, 1999 and Bartley, 2007), intensified in this case by the familial and communal issues we have identified. Thus, in other cases the thickness might come from some other source of significant meaning that might, indeed, include something like the extent of emotional labour involved in the volunteering.…”

“…If it was just family, just community, just history and so on – for all that any of these might be highly meaningful – the volunteering would have been less thick; it is their cumulative effect that made it all the more so, rather like the ‘deepening’ and ‘interweaving’ of issues described in some of the studies of volunteers discussed earlier (e.g. Bartley, 2007; Palmer et al, 2007).…”

“…If we prefer the thickness metaphor it is in part because it also captures a sense of texturing as well as depth. Bartley's (2007) account of being a mental health volunteer in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina provides a remarkable testimony to this. Here, she describes a complex interweaving of a variety of themes around challenge, encompassing dislocation, anxiety and confusion, substantial physical hardship and danger of death.…”

Transformative experiences for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita disaster volunteers

“…Figley (1995) talks about compassion fatigue in workers who provide services to traumatized victims. Traumatic stress symptoms do not always appear immediately (Bartley, 2007;Ursano et al, 1999). A year after the hurricane event, little had been published regarding secondary stress reactions in relief workers.…”

Training and Practice in Trauma, Catastrophes, and Disaster Counseling

“…Since trauma-related assistance is needed locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally, we strongly believe that counseling psychologists and counseling psychology programs need to incorporate it into their repertoire. Recent articles that emphasize the reduction of posttrauma distress (e.g., Bartley, 2007; Ruzek et al, 2007) and discuss real-world situations and interventions can easily be used as training tools. Again, we hope that counseling psychologists will develop and expand their training programs to include work in disaster prevention and relief, as counseling psychologists are in a unique position to do so.…”