Phoenix Australia Disaster Mental Health Hub

Are you someone who is working or volunteering in a disaster recovery role and feel like you’re a bit out of your depth when it comes to mental health impacts? Or maybe you’re a GP or a mental health practitioner working with disaster affected patients and would like an evidence informed brush up?

We know that it’s very common for people who are affected by a disaster to experience some form of distress. A small but significant portion of these people will go on to develop a mental health disorder or experience an exacerbation of a pre-existing mental health condition.

Phoenix Australia (formerly known as the Australian Centre for Post-traumatic Mental Health) launched a disaster mental health hub not too long ago. It’s chock full of short videos, evidence summaries, toolkits, screening tools and tips sheets on a wide range of topics related to the mental health effects of disasters. Topics include PTSD, anxiety, sleep disturbance, alcohol misuse and children’s mental health.

This is an excellent website to bookmark so that you can dip in and out of it as you need. One of the coolest features of it is that you can search via audience (e.g. community recovery workers, allied health professionals, GPs etc), by resource type (e.g. screening tools, podcasts, multilingual materials) and topics (e.g. specific mental health conditions, family violence, trauma informed care).

This website is an excellent, robust and detailed resource to keep handy so that your work can be as evidence informed as possible.

Check out the Phoenix Australia Disaster Mental Health Hub here.