Psychosocial resilience and its influence on managing mass emergencies and disasters

By Richard Williams, J. Drury. 2009

90 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article argues that, while emergencies and disasters are distressing for most people and may result in mental disorders for a substantial minority of affected persons at some time in the following months and years, there are personal and collective sources of psychosocial resilience. The concepts, bases, and practical potential of resilience have been explored for more than 40 years. However, studies of pathology, which emphasizes peoples vulnerability over their adaptive capacities, have predominated. The nature and basis of personal psychosocial resilience are outlined, and a new approach to collective resilience that has been developed through recent research on crowd psychology is described. The article concludes with some implications for managing disasters and practice, including the suggestion that crowds be treated as part of the solution rather than part of the problem in mass emergencies and disasters.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Emergency Medical Services, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb9d5e6fb5273d5804613d85162de1031f541462

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. J. Drury

In Emergency Medical Services

1. J. Drury
2. Richard Williams
3. Evangelos Ntontis
4. R. Amlȏt
5. G. Rubin

In Sociology and Political Science

1. J. Drury
2. Stephen D. Reicher
3. C. Cocking
4. Richard Williams
5. Evangelos Ntontis
6. R. Amlȏt
7. G. Rubin
8. Martijn van Zomeren

Citations in the corpus

• Emergent social identities in a flood: Implications for community psychosocial resilience (2018, background): “The emergence of collective behaviour in emergencies and disasters has been explained through the social identity model of collective psychosocial resilience (SIMCR; Drury et al., 2009; Drury, 2012; Williams & Drury, 2009).”
• The Nature of Collective Resilience: Survivor Reactions to the 2005 London Bombings (2009, background): “…increases individuals’ chances of physical survival and psychological recovery, since the crowd enables them practically to realise goals they cannot achieve alone, including organizing the world around them to minimize the risks of being exposed to further trauma (see Williams and Drury 2009).”
• The role of social identity processes in mass emergency behaviour: An integrative review (2018, background): “This account has elsewhere been referred to as a model of collective psychosocial resilience (e.g., Drury, 2012; Williams & Drury, 2009) and can be seen as part of the “social cure” approach (Haslam, Jetten, Cruwys, Dingle, & Haslam, 2018) because these group processes, based on shared social…”