How Do Public Health Emergencies and Natural Disasters Affect Mental Health Care Access?

Public health emergencies and disasters often have unique challenges that require flexible solutions. Different disasters and emergencies necessitate different health service needs, depending on who they impact and how.

Emergencies and disasters are typically unexpected, often highlighting one or more public systems that have failed to support the public’s needs. Public health systems can anticipate at least one disaster if one has not already occurred, especially with changing temperatures due to climate change and growing population.

Exposure to disasters, including hurricanes, fires, floods, and contagious disease outbreaks, can severely affect many individuals’ mental health, which can add to the rising needs of services that are already stretched thin…

 

Mental Health: Role of the individual for their well-being in the pandemic

According to WHO data, Brazil is the country that occupies the largest number of anxiety cases in the world (9.3%), while the United States of America has 5.6% of cases. Emotional problems such as anxiety and stress are potentially harmful to mental health and can lead to depression and affect the immune system. In the current context of the pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2, leading to the isolation of the population, the concern with the mental health of individuals becomes even more worrying.

The radical change in routine in people’s lives is one of the worst weather conditions resulting from the pandemic. Knowing how to deal with work tasks and manage activities through online platforms with reduced ease caused by human contact has been a challenge for many. For that, one of the alternatives has been resilience. After all, as studies point out (SILVA et al., 2016) resilience is related to greater personal fulfillment and less emotional exhaustion…