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Psychological first aid and mental health first aid can assist anyone experiencing difficulties, including post-disaster populations. Its effectiveness has been demonstrated around the world, such as in Bangladesh, with plenty of opportunities for continuing and improving this work. Two recent scientific reviews offer summaries of and directions for psychological first aid in disasters.
Social work practice
The journal Social Work in Mental Health published a five-author collaboration among researchers in Thailand, Sweden, and Bangladesh. The authors sought and analysed publications on psychological first aid in disasters for social work.
Their search to find these publications used a single academic database and a highly focused set of keywords. For instance, they used “Psychological First Aid” and “PFA,” but do not mention “Mental Health First Aid” and “MHFA.” These categories have overlaps as well as differences. The search’s time frame started in 2000, with the justification that modern psychological first aid emerged around then, and ran to 2025.
The authors imposed no language restrictions, but keywords are listed only in English. The search resulted in 276 publications for analysis.
Their analysis identifies spikes in publication numbers after three major disasters: Haiti’s 2010 earthquake disaster, Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which ran from 2020 to 2023. No explanation is offered for why many other major disasters did not lead to similar increases in publication numbers.
Other analyses included geographic origin of papers, author collaborations, and thematic analyses. No detailed comment is made about how the number of scientists, the number of journals, and the number of papers have expanded substantially over the study period. It is possible that the number of publications on psychological first aid in disasters for social work has increased, but its share of science has decreased due to the rapid expansion of scientific publications.
The paper’s framing differentiated natural disasters from human-made disasters (using the non-gender-neutral term “man-made”), even though baseline disaster research has spent over 50 years explaining why the phrase “natural disaster” is a misnomer and should not be used. The paper also differentiates countries according to income levels without explaining why healthcare, especially mental healthcare, is not necessarily better in certain groups of countries. As a poor person, try getting preventive mental healthcare in the U.S., or consider the length of waiting lists in the U.K. for any form of mental health support.
Trends and developments
The other review was a sole-authored paper from a scientist based in Türkiye, published in the journal Current Psychology and covering a different publications database without time restrictions. The earliest article found was from 1998, and the search was conducted in 2024. As with the first paper, “mental health first aid” and “MHFA” were not listed for the search.
One hundred sixty-eight articles met the criteria, again without language restriction, yet searching in English only according to the reported method. Nonetheless, the author found and included papers in English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, and Portuguese.
A quantitative analysis mapped and interpreted the publications’ content. The author examined author networks, citations, countries, institutions, and keywords. Four clusters of topics appeared: psychological first aid training, disaster mental health and psychosocial support, children, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The analysis considered the number of publications, explaining why more papers were published after specific disasters, notably the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster; Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. in 2005, which is misreported as being in 2008; the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami disaster; and the 2014 to 2016 Ebola outbreak, referred to as both a “pandemic” and an “epidemic.” COVID-19 features prominently, and a major increase in publication numbers is attributed to this outbreak. The author notes that the two journals publishing the most papers on psychological first aid in disasters are the two journals publishing the most papers overall among the journals publishing in this field.
Similarly to the first paper, the paper uses the phrase “natural disaster” uncritically while referring to the common myth of “the increasing frequency and severity of disasters.”
Acting on the analyses
Both papers provide solid recommendations for moving forward with psychological first aid in disasters. Prominent is training and education, especially collaboration among educators, practitioners, and researchers. Contextualising and localising this work is deemed important, supporting people locally to help themselves in disaster response.
Disaster Psychology Essential Reads
The papers mention the importance of including everyone as well as making the best use of digital health, telehealth, and other technological approaches. Plenty of work exists explaining how digitisation increases inclusivity for many and decreases it for many others. The papers’ suggestions for regulations, monitoring, and evaluation apply to ensuring that shifts and advances in how psychological first aid is administered would not leave out anyone.
Despite major efforts and successes in avoiding disasters, calamity continues to devastate lives and societies. Psychological first aid not only helps people get through the worst time of their lives, but also inspires those affected to do better by preventing disasters from happening in the first place.
