Whilst our research does not explore the potential impact of common fate on identification and helping, and thus cannot speak to these processes, we show instead how communities may bond further by actively helping and supporting vulnerable residents. However, recent literature exploring such strategies focusses primarily on community identities that emerge in response to emergencies or disasters (e.g., Ntontis et al., 2018). Whilst the benefits of this response are clear for recipients, the current study shifts focus to illustrate potential health benefits for volunteers themselves.
4. Giving coordinated help predicts depression via community identification and unity
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has recently embarked on initiatives to promote resilience through the development of social capital in communities by incorporating equity and social justice principles into a broad array of public health initiatives relating to preparedness planning and response. There is emerging consensus among US policy leaders that community resilience is fundamental to disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. NIMH is supporting research to understand the factors that influence a person’s mental health after a potentially traumatic event.
Whole Community Approach to Resilience: Closing the Public Health Policy Gap
- The decisive pro‐social responses needed to bolster support delivery for the vulnerable are therefore vital for effective pandemic management (Drury, Reicher, & Stott, 2020; Elcheroth & Drury, 2020) but may also constitute a psychological resource to protect community members’ mental health and well‐being.
- A balanced diet plays a significant role in psychological well-being, with certain nutrients having a direct impact on brain health.
- Only seven studies (14.0%) allowed free slopes within trajectories, while no study allowed for different variances between trajectories.
- It is conceived to operate along with the trauma and intercedes before the development of symptoms, so resilient individuals will have minimal or no symptoms.
- The COVID‐19 pandemic has significant implications for mental health and well‐being, to the extent that these outcomes have been labelled a “second pandemic” (Choi, Heilemann, Fauer, & Mead, 2020).
The role of community members and organisations in distributing resources and information is crucial for effective emergency responses. Fair resource distribution across various cities and counties has been found to promote trust, cooperation, inclusion and engagement, enhancing effective health communication in the face of health risks and social vulnerability . In the context of a health emergency, clarity about community leadership structures is essential for ensuring clear communication channels between the central government, local authorities and the community 44, 48. For example, research by Jackson et al. highlights the critical role of communities in co-designing emergency communication strategies, which contrasts with the more unidirectional approaches observed in many other studies.
Recognition of each child’s or youth’s intersections of gender, lifestage, family resources within the context of their identity markers fits with a localized approach to resilience promotion and, at the same time, requires recognition of the broader determinants of population health. Although the contribution of resilience theory is its greater emphasis on adaptive capacities, we should not loose sight of the fundamental role of the stressor. This unpleasant conclusion is more palatable if one remembers that resilience is not an immutable characteristic that a community has or does not have but is instead a process that emerges from malleable resources.
Decades of research on collective trauma indicates that each of these events in Nashville may independently have adverse mental health impacts for exposed individuals (for a review see Neria et al., 2008). Individual resilience had a protective, inverse relationship with PTS and depression symptoms and mediated the relationship between community resilience and adverse mental health outcomes. The implication is that programs and interventions designed to enhance resilience are complimentary within public health and population health–the effect does not substitute the need for consideration of income policy, housing policy, community development and other social determinants. There is no solid evidence that such interventions alone are sufficient for closing the equity gap in mental and physical health, and the process of enhancing resilience and reducing social vulnerability will be limited when differential conditions of exposure remain large and intact. Critical to the focus of this review is whether resilience interventions have sufficient strength and effectiveness to enhance an individuals’ capacity for overcoming social and economic adversity.
Assessments of resilience of this type might prioritize measures of social equity as foundations of that capacity to be resilient into the future and identifying mechanisms through which a more just society contributes to improved disaster preparedness and response. Although the conceptual grounding in building community resilience was initially met with less trust than the traditional emergency preparedness approach, over time, the training activities emphasizing community resilience such as capacity building and enhancing diversity led to greater growth in those coalitions, even across geographic regions. Resilience-building interventions are often unlikely to work outside the community they were designed for due to challenges including “regional differences, jurisdictional differences, linguistic differences, cultural differences, as well as differences in risk perception, and governmental capacity” . More theoretical takes on how resilience thinking could better consider the function of social capital challenges researchers to think more deeply about the potential mechanisms linking social capital to resilience by demonstrating that its most common form, bonding capital, can indeed have a “dark https://www.cdcfoundation.org/howrightnow side” through entrenchment in traditional social institutions leading to conflicts, patronage networks, and constrained access to vital resources . This finding is an important contribution to the literature on social capital and disaster resilience, as it attempts to delve further into the specific functions of social capital that might lead to resilient outcomes rather than using the concept broadly as the majority literature still tends suffer from.