Mental health advocates rally to help hurricane survivors

In the days following Hurricane Harvey, Dr. Sophia Banu’s practice moved into Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center. That’s where thousands of people took shelter after losing their homes—and for some, family or friends.

Banu, an attending physician at Ben Taub Hospital, gathered 10 mental health professionals, mostly volunteers, to provide on-call counseling, around the clock to evacuees.

At one point, each clinician was seeing an average of two to three patients an hour. And they expected those services to soon be in greater demand.

“There will be a huge need for mental healthcare moving forward,” Banu said.

Katrina taught public health advocates that witnessing mass devastation, experiencing loss of property and lives, and enduring the stress of rebuilding placed a huge toll on the emotional and mental health of survivors.

Nearly half of Katrina survivors suffered from some type of mental health distress upon returning to New Orleans, according to a 2010 study published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. Many continued to feel the effects long after. In the years since Katrina, stable housing and economically related stress have begun to carry more weight in a person’s overall health status.

That’s led providers to champion mental health services after the recent storms. “An essential part of the recovery process should include addressing those needs,” said Dr. Bechara Choucair, senior vice president and chief community health officer at Kaiser Permanente. Last week the giant health system donated $500,000 to support mental health services in areas affected by Hurricane Harvey. It’s the first time Kaiser has targeted mental and emotional healthcare as a part of disaster relief funding. The system donated a total of $1 million to help rebuild the Houston area, which took on more than 50 inches of rain. More than 70 people died and more than 200,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed due to flooding. And little more than two weeks later, Florida was brac- ing for Hurricane Irma. The need for counseling could be difficult to address there. The not-for-profit Florida Policy Institute ranked Florida as 49th in the nation as measured by per-capita expenditures on mental health services.

Providers such as Kaiser that have taken social determinants of health, including stress and mental illness, into account have been more successful in improving the overall health of patients. That’s likely because, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, close to 70% of behavioral health patients have a medical co-morbidity.

Dr. Maureen Lichtveld, professor and chair of environmental health sciences at Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, said mental health services in New Orleans were low before Katrina. In the years since, more community resources are available, creating a kind of social network. “This is all about planning and knowing your gap so that others around you can help fill it,” Lichtveld said.

That kind of response has worked well in Harvey’s aftermath. Mental Health America of Greater Houston, a not-forprofit advocacy group, along with city and county public health officials as well as local mental health and substance abuse disorder providers that together make up the Network of Behavioral Health Providers, mobilized teams of volunteer providers to provide counseling for hurricane victims. Kaiser’s donation will help those efforts.

“This is all about planning and knowing your gap so that others around you can help fill it.”

Dr. Maureen Lichtveld Professor and chair of environmental health sciences at Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine

So far, both the private and public sector have responded generously to Harvey. Nashville-based HCA Healthcare announced plans to donate $2 million to the American Red Cross. Insurer UnitedHealthcare and pharmaceutical firm AbbVie each pledged $1 million to the Red Cross, while drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb said it will donate $250,000 to Americares, Direct Relief International and the Red Cross and give $10 million in free medicine to those groups.

Congress last week passed an emergency aid package worth more than $15 billion. According to Dr. John Myers, executive vice president at physician staffing firm Envision Healthcare, that money should help cover the cost of deploying hundreds of healthcare professionals in the affected areas.