Page 18 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

Introduction xvii

for spiritual care and mental health alike, a comprehensive treatment of
effective communication strategies during crisis, a brief look at ethical and
legal considerations relevant to interdisciplinary collaboration, and a full
discussion of the psychosocial impact of disasters.
Section II of the book looks at collaboration-in-action, providing
concrete vignettes of collaborative work from several different contexts
of disaster work, encompassing multiple perspectives from different
authors. Section II includes organizational and individual work in post-
Katrina Louisiana, South Asia, New York, and other areas and includes
discussion of collaborative relationships between government, mental
health organizations, and faith-based organizations around financial
and psychosocial strains in disaster. There also is a discussion of col-
laboration in the setting of schools, using relationships between mental
health and staff in the service of providing care for children, to illus-
trate principles of collaboration that are exportable to other settings.
The third and final section highlights the conjoint elements of disas-
ter interdisciplinary collaboration pertaining to resilience and trauma
(we refer the reader to other resources for more in-depth discussion as
required because this book is not primarily intended to be a comprehen-
sive manual of trauma or disasters in general). Section III addresses the
role of routines and rituals, discusses resilience from various perspectives,
examines retraumatization and the important role it plays in disaster
work for both spiritual care and mental health responders, looks at the
role of faith in collaborative settings, and examines the important issue of
pathological versus normal reactions and how this pertains to collabora-
tive work when groups and individuals with different approaches come
together to address the needs of others.

Grant H. Brenner M.D.
Daniel H. Bush, M.Div.
Joshua Moses, M.A.