Insights Into The Concept Of Stress
Emergency response personnel are unique in that they dedicate their time and
energy in assisting persons during stressful times of their lives, for example,
after disasters such as hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, etc. The
repeated exposure does have a potentially deleterious effect on their psychological
well-being, what can greatly affect the overall outcome of such situations,
including the prognosis of the primary victims of the event.
The Stress Management in Disasters in the Caribbean (SMID) Program, designed
to prevent and to mitigate the psychological dysfunction which exposure to traumatic
situations like disasters may cause in emergency response personnel, is based
on the princi-ples of crisis intervention and critical incident stress management
and it is not intended to take the place of professional therapy. Instead, it
seeks to provide persons with the knowledge and skills to better understand,
recognize and manage their emotional responses to traumatic situations.
This workbook, Insights into the Concept of Stress, and the companion
workbook, Stress Management in Disasters,
were designed to provide the basic training material for persons who will be
providing such a service.
This book can be ordered from PAHO's Emergency Preparedness Program (disaster-publications@paho.org),
or can be downloaded, by chapters, as PDF files. You need to have installed
Adobe Acrobat Reader to read these files. It can be obtained free of charge
from the Adobe
Website.
Entire Publication (438 Kb.)
