Learning New Ways to Do Good

Bonanno, Brewin, Kaniasty, and LaGreca (2010, this issue) provide a comprehensive and authoritative review of research on risk and resilience following disaster, including the authors’ own ground-breaking work in this area. This review seems particularly timely given the apparent excess of natural and human-made disasters in the news in recent years. Images of hurricane victims in New Orleans, tsunami victims in Southeast Asia, earthquake victims in Haiti, and flood victims in Pakistan, as well as those who lost their livelihoods due to the Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf Coast, haunt us, moving us to want to do something. Bonanno et al. caution that some well-motivated attempts to prevent psychological harm in disaster victims may backfire, undermining the natural coping and healing processes that characterize the majority of victims. The authors persuasively demonstrate that the strong majority of victims are resilient, showing little evidence of long-term psychological harm. Still, there is a minority of individuals who suffer long-term distress—manifested in many ways in addition to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—who could benefit from empirically informed interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy. Sadly, few of these individuals will have access to such interventions, particularly when their whole community has been ravaged by a disaster. The aspect of the review by Bonanno et al. that is probably most novel to many psychologists is their discussion of the impact of disasters on families and communities. We are accustomed to thinking about both risk factors and interventions at the level of the individual. The authors make clear, however, that some of the most potent risk factors for postdisaster psychological distress may be at the family and community level, such as decreased instrumental and emotional support. Further, some of the most potent (and safe) interventions may be to restore community and family resources and cohesion as soon as possible after the disaster. This suggests that psychologists should work with sociologists, political scientists, and economists, among other professionals, to study communityand family-level factors that most strongly impact individuals’ well-being after a disaster and to design new interventions to restore factors promoting resilience.