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Timothy Sim, Ke Cui, Psychosocial Needs Assessment and Interventions in a Chinese Postdisaster Community, Health & Social Work, Volume 40, Issue 4, November 2015, Pages 329–332, https://doi.org/10.1093/hsw/hlv061
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A substantial body of literature has developed about the impact of disasters on people’s mental health and level of functioning (North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO], 2008). Exposure to a disaster often has a devastating impact on the psychological and social well-being of people (Liu et al., 2011) and can threaten peace, human rights, and development (Inter-Agency Standing Committee [IASC], 2007). The mental health and psychosocial impacts of disasters have attracted increasing attention as they severely disrupt the lives of large numbers of people (Silove & Steel, 2006).
China has one of the world’s largest numbers of severe natural disasters of different types (X. J. Li, 2004). For example, seven of the 25 most deadly earthquakes ever recorded occurred in China (Naranjo, 2010). The most recent at the time of this writing is the magnitude eight Wenchuan earthquake that ravaged Sichuan province on May 12, 2008 (Naranjo, 2010), killing 88,000 people, injuring 400,000 people and leaving 5 million people homeless (United Nations Children’s Fund [UNICEF], 2009). As a result of the high casualty rate of this earthquake, Chinese people generally became more aware of the mental health and psychological needs of survivors, particularly those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (for example, B. Wang et al., 2011; Zhou et al., 2013).
