Page 252 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

Normative and Diagnostic Reactions to Disaster 221

familiarity and experience can be invaluable to facilitating appropriate and
continuous mental health care for their parishioners through “contextual-
izing” an individual’s response to disaster by sharing salient aspects of the
person’s life history and cultural worldview with the treating clinician.
Therefore, rather than think of clergy-led commemorative events as a
part of the clinical response, we need to organize clinical treatments as
part of the community response. The goal of disaster mental health care
is community restoration. With restoration as our goal, it is necessary for
emergency responders to seek guidance from coprofessional community
clergy. What follows (see Figure 16.1) is a description of a model of Clergy
Outreach and Professional Engagement (COPE) that provides guidance to
clinicians and clergy on how to optimize their collaboration before, dur-
ing and after disasters.

1

Before Disaster,
and for Restoration:

Community 2

4 Context Early
Relapse
Prevention? Post-Impact:
Community Spiritual
Care
Coherence
3
If Emotional
Dysfunction?
Clinical
Care

© 2009 Glen Milstein, Ph.D.

Figure 16.1 A continuum of care in response to disaster through Clergy
Outreach and Professional Engagement (COPE).