State Of California Mental/Behavioral Health Disaster Framework

The Framework was developed by a Core Work Group, which included CAMFT representatives on the California Disaster Mental Health Coalition.

Evidence suggests that the level of mental/behavioral disorder post disaster exceeds 50% and the impacts can be drawn out and persist over years and decades after disasters.

Disaster mental/behavioral health workers will triage, assess, and provide early psychological first aid, crisis counseling and make referrals, consistent with their level of training and scope of practice.

Mental/behavioral health mitigation actions refer to activities that (1) support individual and community resiliency and (2) have the potential to reduce the need for disaster mental/behavioral health interventions.

Mental/behavioral health function activities are not to be conducted during the response phase of a disaster to avoid interfering with emergency operations.

The National Incident Management System (NIMS) has been replaced by the Standardized Emergency Management System (SEMS) and is the fundamental structure for all activities during the response phase of emergency management.

Psychological First Aid is an evidence-informed approach to help survivors and/or emergency response personnel in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event. It is designed to reduce initial distress caused by these events and to foster short and long term adaptive functioning and coping.

The Crisis Counseling Program is focused on preventing or mitigating adverse repercussions of a disaster with services that include supportive crisis counseling, education, development of coping skills, and linkage to appropriate resources.

The Crisis Counseling Program contracts with licensed mental health professionals to provide psychotherapy services to individuals and families as necessary.

The seven points in the preamble are the foundational concepts for understanding the disaster mental health core competencies.