Challenges in Developing a Disaster Worker Mental Health Resiliency Training Program

The National Institutes for Environmental Health Sciences Worker Education and Training Program (WETP) was involved in responding to a the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and identified the need for training disaster workers about stress, trauma, mental health effects, and resiliency. There are a number of challenges to developing a "Disaster Worker Mental Health Resilience Training Program":

1) overcoming workers resistance to viewing mental health as an important health and safety concern,

2) developing training materials that put complex mental health concepts and terminology into plain language,

3) balancing the needs to teach self-care and stress management with information on employer / organizational interventions that largely don't exist at this point in time.

The goal of implementing the program includes improvements in mental health outcomes for participating disaster workers as well as improvement in co-worker and organizational support systems.