The Relationship Between Disaster and Stress

Emergency and Disaster Management
Student Name
Institutional Affiliation
Emergency and Disaster Management
Introduction
Comprehending the meaning of a disaster and how it impacts the populaces provides emergency managers and policy-makers the optimal opportunity to intervene in the occurrence of a calamity. An issue that can be derived from this is delineating what a disaster means and entails appropriately. It is common knowledge that it is increasingly a social construction rather than a geographic occurrence. By reading Parts II and III – Chapters 10 - 20 of "What is a Disaster" by Perry & Quarantelli (eds.), one learns the threshold for defining an event that emerges disastrous. Also, readers know whether the disaster is more of a natural occurrence or attributed to human actions. By understanding collective stress, as well as the analytical and practical delineations of a disaster, researchers can try to answer such concerns and support an acceptable definition.
Relationship between Disaster and Stress
Within the discussion of crises, calamities, as well as other adverse events that occur to individuals, parties within the emergency prevention and management field need to examine how such contexts impact individual’s way above the bodily implications. Particularly, stress coupled with its ramifications on societies as well as the persons via the disaster development paradigm must be understood to ensure the best possible assistance and prevention can be offered. Stress could be viewed from distinct perspectives – individual and collective stress. Individual stress can be delineated as a chemical, emotional, or physical factor that causes mental or bodily harm and could be an element in illness causation (Barton, 2005). As earlier noted, this understanding of stress is important to ensure appropriate intervention and preventive measures.
Stress, as it relates to disaster, is normally viewed as a collective domain. This is important since disaster typically impacts a large number of individuals. Barton defined collective stress as “many members of a social system fail to receive expected conditions of life from the system” (Barton). These conditions emanate from external forces, including earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and more. They could also emerge from internal sources such as inflation, economic depression, civil wars, slums, and many more (Gillespie, 1998). As already acknowledged, a disaster is more of a social domain that is a physical occurrence. In this way, collective stress provides those within the emergency field and other fronts with an approach to assess the disfunction. Barton explicitly articulated this by reiterating that employing the “collective stress” concept to assess diverse contexts of large-scale deprivation varying on different scopes, with “local physical disaster” as a single subtype, evokes important theoretical points and questions about various experimental instances from which to derive solutions. That said, the scaled-up construct links to challenges of averting, coping as well as mitigating the physical calamities to a universal discipline of societal challenges as well as an approach by which communities...