Page 158 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

On Reentering the Chapel 127

Descriptive Experiences

In this chapter, this multidisciplinary team of authors reviews experiences
drawn from the journal of a psychiatrist who volunteered to provide post-
disaster mental health services in church-based shelters in Louisiana in
the month after Hurricane Katrina. The psychiatrist, Rebecca P. Smith,
was deployed as part of a two-person team (including one of the coeditors
of this volume, Grant H. Breuner) by an organization of volunteer psy-
chiatrists. Through providing psychiatric services in these church-based
shelters in rural Louisiana, she and her teammate received an education in
the depth and breadth of what faith-based communities can accomplish
in caring for survivors of a disaster and were provided the opportunity to
provide assistance and support as psychiatrists to these communities.
Several experiences from the first day of the response are discussed that
illustrate some of the challenges faced by those in the chapels who took
responsibility for trying to run the shelters, and the remarkable resilience
they each displayed. In order to protect the privacy of those who received
psychiatric services, details have been changed, and the clinical care pro-
vided will not be named. Finally, a piece will be provided detailing the
ways in which, after the response, in the postdisaster period, collaboration
continued in the form of “spiritual supervision” between a psychiatrist
and a provider of spiritual care.
We believe that these experiences illustrate how, for psychiatrists,
working with leaders (both formal and informal) in faith-based commu-
nities can provide unprecedented opportunities to remove barriers to care
and expand opportunities for us as psychiatrists to foster health and heal-
ing after a disaster. The pieces also illustrate how interdisciplinary col-
laboration between psychiatrists and spiritual care providers can promote
morale and a renewed sense of competence and hope for each in ways that
are often very surprising.

“Entering the Chapel”: Providing Services in Church-
Based Shelters After Hurricane Katrina

Discussion of the response to Hurricane Katrina involving services pro-
vided in rural church-based shelters may at first seem hard to reconcile
with the immense scale of Hurricane Katrina, the largest disaster in U.S.
history. Before visiting these church-based shelters, it was difficult to