Lessons learned from psychosocial support and mental health surveys during the 10 years since the Great East Japan Earthquake: Establishing evidence‐based disaster psychiatry

Abstract

Post‐disaster mental health and psychosocial support have drawn attention in Japan after the 1995 Great Hanshin‐Awaji Earthquake, with mental health care centers for the affected communities being organized. After the catastrophe, a reconstruction budget was allocated to organize mental health care centers to provide psychosocial support for communities affected by the 2007 Chūetsu offshore earthquake, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, and the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake. There were several major improvements in post‐disaster mental health measures after the Great East Japan Earthquake. The Disaster Psychiatric Assistance Team system was organized after the earthquake to orchestrate disaster response related to the psychiatric health system and mental health of the affected communities. Special mental health care efforts were drawn to the communities affected by the nuclear power plant accident through Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and high yield Explosives, being succeeded by measures against the coronavirus pandemic. As another new movement after the Great East Japan Earthquake, the number of surveys involving communities affected by disasters has soared. More than 10 times the number of scientific publications were made in English during the decade following the Great East Japan Earthquake, compared with the previous decades. In this review, we examined the results and issues acquired in the 10 years since the Great East Japan Earthquake, proposing evidence‐based disaster psychiatry as the direction of future mental health measures related to emergency preparedness and response.

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“…The KeyGrps in the "mental health" class were extracted from five categories that included mental symptoms and mental status and were considered susceptible after a disaster: psychological distress, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress response (PTSR), and resilience, which have also been frequently examined in previous disasters (Kunii et al 2022a;Kunii et al 2022b). The number of KeyGrps belonging to each of the above categories was five for psychological distress, ten for depression, five for anxiety, 18 for PTSR, and one for resilience; however, excluding those that overlapped among the categories, 26 KeyGrps were set in the "mental health" class.…”

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