story by Claire Miller
According to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, more than 100 million people experienced natural disasters across the world in 2021, resulting in more than 10,000 deaths and $252.1 billion in economic losses.
While mental health professionals play a crucial role in providing care for people affected by natural disasters, that role is often through training community members to make a difference in their own community. Counseling psychologists are committed to equipping community members, not just waiting for people to come to psychotherapy.
College of Education & Human Development scholars published a pilot study in Spirituality in Clinical Practice on the effectiveness of training people to care for natural disaster survivors using Spiritual First Aid. The project was led by CEHD alum Aaron McLaughlin (a former Dean’s Doctoral Research Fellow) and included Professor Don Davis and doctoral students Hannah Cowart and Sarah Gazaway working in the Matheny Center for the Study of Stress, Trauma and Resilience.
Spiritual First Aid was developed by counseling and psychology researchers with expertise in providing care during natural disasters. When people are dealing with extreme stress, trauma or grief, it is easy for volunteers with good intentions to try to help in ways that make things worse. Nonprofit organizations of all kinds – churches, faith-based organizations and other nonprofit organizations – need help training volunteers to help in ways that translate good intentions into effective and coordinated care. Spiritual First aid includes a manual, training videos, role-playing scenarios and other resources designed to help disaster spiritual and emotional care providers offer support to communities in the aftermath of disasters.
“Equipping religious leaders and lay helpers with mental health resources for responding to spiritual and emotional needs in the wake of disasters could be a strong strategy for addressing nuances of religiousness and spirituality that psychologists may not be able to address due to disciplinary and professional roles,” the research team wrote. “Effective aid could help survivors connect back with their faith community, receive support and move toward coherence, security and/or personal growth.”
The training is very practical and skill focused. In the pilot study, participants completed an eight-hour online course in Spiritual First Aid. Before and after the training, they practiced responses to a series of vignettes. Participants had to read each vignette, which centered on a hypothetical scenario related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and then select the correct multiple-choice answer for how someone should respond based on the spiritual first aid training.
"The multiple-choice responses included a correct answer that represented a practical or humble helping response and also 'pitfalls,' which were incorrect answers including unhelpful (or potentially harmful) responses," the researchers explained. "Correct responses were based on examples provided in the curriculum. For 20 of these items, pitfalls were related to trying to fix a problem too quickly, being impractical in supporting the need or missing the need altogether."
The research group found a “small but significant increase” in the percentage of participants who chose the correct answers from the pre-test to the post-test. They also saw a small decrease in the number who selected a “too quick to fix” pitfall after completing the training.
The largest difference between the pre- and post-tests came from the answers on the vignettes about safety risks, where “incorrect choices were categorized as indirectly assessing safety or choosing not to assess or respond to the risk at all.”
After finishing the spiritual first aid training, participants decreased their number of indirect responses (from 21.68 percent to 10.5 percent) and chose more direct ways of responding to safety risks (from 55.58 percent to 72.43 percent).
As a result of the training, volunteers were “more adept at choosing responses that were practical, humble and risk reducing in times of disaster and trauma,” the authors wrote. “They were less likely to be ‘quick-to-fix’ a need and more likely to be direct in assessing safety risks.”