Developed for emergency preparedness and response professionals, this guide explains how to incorporate language access into emergency plans. It discusses how to identify groups of people who speak specific languages and to ensure that individuals in these groups have access to services. The guide is designed to help professionals comply with legal requirements for meaningful access to services for people with limited English proficiency.

This web page provides an overview of how a disaster or traumatic event may affect a person with serious mental illness (SMI) differently because of the way he or she experiences a disaster. It also offers information that suggests that people with SMI are more likely to develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following disasters than people without SMI.

This article describes research on the process and effects of merging, after Hurricane Sandy, of substance use disorder treatment programs in New York City to ensure continuity of care. Investigators interviewed healthcare practitioners in the programs to understand challenges and measures they took that proved successful in terms of patient retention and both patient and staff health and well-being following the hurricane.

Designed for mental health professionals and researchers, this online fact sheet provides information about trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and suicide. It presents suicide statistics, identifies types of trauma associated with increased risk of suicide (e.g., military sexual trauma), explores research on whether PTSD increases suicide risk, and highlights types of treatment for PTSD that may also lower risk for suicide.

On this web page, you will find infographics and fact sheets that summarize national suicide statistics based on data from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The fact sheets present suicide statistics by gender, age range, states, and regions of the country.

This report provides an overview of the issue of suicide and the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention, as well as the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention Implementation Assessment Advisory Group (NSSP IAAG), whose work is summarized in this report. The report covers findings of the NSSP IAAG, as well as their recommendations for increasing the effectiveness of implementation efforts in the future.

In this article, researchers describe their work to involve children in emergency management to ensure culturally sensitive disaster programming and better policy. They describe how they have involved children of many cultures in creative projects, which were used to convey key insights to policymakers and inform more culturally aware and sensitive policy development.

The Yale Childhood Violent Trauma Center operates a clinic, runs a program to help First Responders respond more effectively to children and families who have been exposed to violence, and provides training in the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention. The center also provides consultation to agencies and communities affected by disasters.

This article highlights the issues of women and their vulnerability in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. These issues include race, class, age, and disability, in addition to the importance of preparedness and response resources and the best practices that should be followed when attending to the needs of women. [Author: Enarson, E.]

Humanitarian professionals and practitioners developed this handbook to improve gender equality programming in humanitarian efforts and programs. The handbook discusses the basics of gender equality, the coordination of gender equality in emergencies and the elements of conducting effective coordination, and the numerous gender issues with health, food, shelter, and education in emergencies.

This guide discusses the issues of natural disaster recovery for women and their communities.

WHO is the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations system. WHO is responsible for providing leadership on global health matters, shaping the health research agenda, setting norms and standards, articulating evidence-based policy options, providing technical support to countries, and monitoring and assessing health trends.

This issue of the SAMHSA Disaster Technical Assistance Center’s Supplemental Research Bulletin discusses reactions children and youth may have to a natural disaster. It also describes a variety of mental health issues and mental disorders that may occur, as well as substance use and misuse issues among adolescents, and risk and protective factors.

This presentation was developed for a conference dedicated to broadening understanding of the Triple P - Positive Parenting Program and its various applications. Triple P is a program designed for parents to help them prevent emotional problems in their children and address any issues that arise.

This article reviews advances that have been made in research and experience after 9/11 that have led to the development of evidence-based and evidence-informed guidelines and strategies to support the design and implementation of public mental health programs after terrorism and disaster. [Authors: Watson, P.J., Brymer, M. J., and Bonanno, G. A.]

This online article reviews how family members can be affected by having a loved one with posttraumatic stress disorder. It discusses common reactions family members will have to a loved one’s traumatic experience and what professionals can do to help these families. [Authors: Carlson, E. B., & Ruzek, J.]

This paper offers a statistical review of CISM [critical incident stress management] as an integrated multicomponent Intervention system. [Authors: Rose, S.C., Bisson, J., Churchchill, R., and Wessely, S.]

This document reports on the findings of a project to understand issues in mental and substance use disorder services in rural areas. It covers barriers to mental health and substance use disorder service delivery, model programs and policy strategies, and the roles of telehealth and state and local organizations in service delivery in rural communities.

This report describes a study to identify promising practices for rural mental health and substance use-related programs across the United States. The report explains the importance of promising practices, defines and describes promising practices, and presents in Appendix C the programs included in the study.

This online resource provides access to research and findings of the nine Rural Health Research Centers funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Office of Rural Health Policy. Products available through the site include policy briefs, fact sheets, and journal articles, as well as recaps of rural health research and resource collections on topics including rural emergency preparedness and response.

This article discusses the social roles assigned to women as caregivers and nurturers after a disaster. The publication examines the factors that affect the resilience of women, such as the division of labor, visibility levels, human development factors, recourse to legal protection, access to information, supply of information, and importance of including women in the disaster recovery decision-making processes.

This web page describes the foci of research on job stress conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), as well as how job stress research fits into the broader research agenda within and beyond NIOSH. The page includes links to a bibliographic database that includes job stress research, related resources, and other NIOSH web pages about stress at work.

Presents 2012 data from an annual nationwide survey that measures attitudes and perceptions of stress among the general public and identifies leading sources of stress, common behaviors used for stress prevention and management and the impact of stress on our lives.

Established by Congress in 1992 and part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, SAMHSA is charged with reducing the impact of substance abuse and mental illness in the United States.

This online article includes information on how a parent’s posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms can affect his or her children. It describes some of the common child responses to those symptoms and offers guidance regarding what a parent should do when faced with this situation. [Author: Price, J. L.]