Page 17 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

xvi Introduction

recently strike different countries of the world. That large-scale disasters,
such as the South Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina occur—along
with the recently coalescing sense of urgency about global warming, a
steadily growing disaster—has only intensified, if not overwhelmed, our
original sense of purpose. The complex, contradictory, sometimes destruc-
tive responses of our political leaders to the above disasters have made this
work harder, and perhaps even more necessary.
Great obstacles and challenges remain for mental health and spiritual
care professionals hoping to help heal the great ruptures of our age, at
least in some measure, by providing integrated care for disaster victims.
This task is further complicated by macropolitical issues that are beyond
the scope of this volume to address directly. Fragmentation is not eas-
ily transformed into integrated resilience, not in individuals and not in
communal structures or among parallel professions. Tensions between
historically rival disciplines remain embedded. Organizational structures
and funding bodies reinforce these separations by sustaining a real or per-
ceived competition over resources. Cross-disciplinary partnerships tend
to be ad hoc and informal rather than sustained and institutionalized.
Because each disaster is unique and novel, although we believe the prin-
ciples articulated in this book are broadly applicable; we encourage the
reader to explore actively the evolving landscape of collaboration between
mental health and spiritual caregivers as it is relevant for you locally, gen-
erating your own ideas, writing and researching, and discussing the sub-
ject frequently with your colleagues.

Overview: Foundations, Collaboration, Trauma, and Resilience

This book is organized in three broad sections. Whenever possible, we
have invited authors from multiple perspectives to write together, with
the writing itself an example of interdisciplinary disaster collaboration.
The end result represents a spectrum of outcomes of these collabora-
tions, with various degrees of fragmentation and integration in differ-
ent chapters.
Section I comprises an overview of foundations relevant to disaster
work, with a focus on issues relevant to parties involved in interdisciplin-
ary collaboration between spiritual care- and mental health-based disaster
workers. This section includes anthropological and ethnographic perspec-
tives, an overview of concrete and pragmatic approaches to collaboration,
a discussion of emotional theory in disaster work as a common touchstone