This guide was developed to assist institutions of higher education in creating and updating emergency plans that are responsive to active shooter situations, as well as natural disasters. This resource was jointly developed by the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services so that campus communities can align their emergency planning practices with those at the national, state, and local levels.

This guide provides information about drought as it affects the health of the U.S. public. Behavioral health-related information is discussed in various sections of this document, particularly beginning on page 27.

Created for behavioral health professionals, this SAMHSA Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) gathers experience and information from experts in behavioral health to highlight best practice guidelines for pursuing a trauma-informed approach and providing trauma-specific services. The resource provides a research-based explanation about trauma and its impacts on substance use and mental disorders to explore intervention and treatment principles.

Part of SAMHSA’s Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) series, this manual provides best-practice guidelines for practitioners offering mental health and substance use disorder treatment services to individuals experiencing homelessness. It defines types of intervention and prevention, stages of recovery, and forms of treatment through discussion and vignettes, as well as a literature review.

This guide is intended to serve as a general briefing to enhance cultural competence while providing services to American Indian and Alaska Native communities.

This web page discusses how technological disasters affect communities, including mental health effects, with a particular focus on the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989. The page features a guide for communities and individuals coping with oil spills and other technological disasters, as well as peer listener training materials, which equip community members to support and counsel each other.

This guidebook helps community officials and individuals throughout a region affected by a technological disaster recognize, identify, and mitigate the adverse psychological effects associated with these events. Included are culturally appropriate outreach and community healing strategies, as well as chapters with information for community groups and counselors, individuals and families, and local government and businesses.

The appendices are a companion document to <em>Coping with Technological Disasters: A User Friendly Guidebook</em>. This document includes community surveys, newspaper articles, in-service training, information directories, and reports.

Educators and school personnel can use this guide to determine how well their school is prepared to respond to the immediate and long-term psychological effects of a crisis or disaster on students, their families, and staff. It offers many practical suggestions for developing procedures and plans for mitigation, prevention, preparation, response, and recovery.

This guide provides information to help schools respond effectively to a range of school crises and disasters that affect school communities. The links provided offer strategies to potentially prevent violent school-based tragedies, identify students who may be at greatest risk of violent behavior, and address the emergent needs of students during times of crisis.

This guide provides an overview of acute stress disorder in children, a less severe and briefer condition than posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Like PTSD, acute stress disorder may be triggered by a natural or human-caused disaster.

This guide provides First Responders agencies with the steps to follow to ensure good health for their workforce. The authors offer an overview of occupational health and safety, review comprehensive occupational health and safety programs, discuss assessing current efforts, and present challenges and provide recommendations for overcoming them.

This guide provides recommendations for local governments and agencies to help them create disaster preparedness and response programs that account for the needs of people with disabilities, which will bring these programs into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

This guide highlights the need for gender-sensitive approaches and provides information on gender issues in disaster management. The document describes the approaches of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies when integrating gender into the disaster management cycle and strengthening accountability for gender impact. The guide also includes international case studies.

This guide lists three steps to preparedness - getting a kit, making a plan, and being informed and describes the activities that should be involved in each of these steps.

Developed by NDIN and the University of Southern California Center for Religion and Civic Culture, this series offers religious literacy and competency guidelines for providers in mass care settings in the United States to assist staff and volunteers in meeting the needs of people of many different religions during disaster response or recovery operations. These guidelines can be applied in work with disaster survivors in a variety of settings.

This video guides emergency management officials and staff in disaster planning for people with access and functional needs. It includes ways in which emergency management can involve people with functional needs in the planning process for their community.

Developed in collaboration with the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Justice, this guide is designed to help individual schools and school districts develop and maintain emergency operations plans that can be used in a disaster. The guide describes the building blocks of a plan, an intervention to help school communities recover after disasters; and ways to respond to an active shooter situation.

This guide reviews combat and operational stress reactions and ways to manage these behaviors. It includes tips for providing support to soldiers in distress and information on coping with deployment separation.

This guide provides in-depth information on specific hazards, including what to do before, during, and after each hazard type.

This guide provides Suicidal Thinking, Behavior, Attempts facts and figures, information on the role of first responders in Suicidal Thinking, Behavior, Attempts prevention, and information on helping someone who is suicidal. It offers information that may be helpful to managers of first responders as they plan, implement, and assess training and programs to prepare responders to work with individuals experiencing suicidality or scenes in which a Suicidal Thinking, Behavior, Attempts has been completed.

This guide examines children’s reactions to disasters and trauma at different stages of development, as well as providing practical advice to parents and school staff for supporting children and adolescents in coping. Also included is information about when and how to get help for mental health problems in children. [Authors: Faculty and staff of the New York University Child Study Center, Koplewicz, H.S., and Cloitre, M.]

The authors provide tips for communicating risk internally (within agencies) and externally (with the community). Strategies for communicating with officers’ families, other agencies, the public, and the are included in the guide.

This guide provides information on the training and education, physical and mental health, and empowerment of women in the aftermath of disasters.

Developed by several federal departments, this collaborative guide provides houses of worship with information regarding emergency operations planning for the spectrum of threats and hazards they may face. It includes steps in the planning process, important components of an emergency operations plan, and an example of how a plan can be used to cope in one type of emergency (an active shooter situation).