Environmental Stress Perspective

My topic is that when will be the best time to carry out psychological interventions for children after severe natural disasters. The relevant theory I choose is environmental stress perspective. In these several years, there are many severe natural disasters, like California wildfires and Hurricane Harvey. After hearing those severe natural disasters, do you know what’s the natural disaster? How can we define it? Now we don’t have a common and accurate definition of natural disaster. From the textbook, we know that we can define natural disasters as events caused by natural forces that destroy or influence our communities we used have (Bell.P.A et al,1996). Natural disasters include earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, tsunami and so on. They

They can kill hundreds of people. Severe natural disaster is a big issue in our society. We can’t control it and we also can’t predict it. After experiencing a severe natural disaster, children usually have some abnormal syndrome. One of the famous syndrome is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It’s an anxiety disorder characterized by having experienced destroyable events (like disaster) as well as frequent, unwanted, and uncontrollable thoughts about the event. Patients usually have sleep disorders, high motivation of thinking about the event, high level of arousal. (Bell.P.A et al,1996). I think that it shows the Environmental Stress Perspective theory. Natural disaster is the stressor that threaten the well-being of people. Children may have a physical and psychological response to it. For example, suppose you have experienced a serious natural disaster yesterday. You lost your house. You can’t find your family members. You may find that your heart beats faster than usual, and you are lost in sorrow. Those reactions are physical and psychological reactions. Physical reactions can show your state of mind. There are strong connections between physical reactions and psychological

For example, it’s hard for children who have PTSD to get rid of it without psychological interventions. We know that people who have PTSD may have a high level of substance use (Dworkin 2017). Children may have a high level of using cigarettes in the future. It’s the behavioral reaction in the environmental stress perspective since they exposed to stress. It will influence their normal life. I want to help them get rid of the struggle process. If we know when is the best time to do the psychological interventions for children after severe natural disaster, we can decrease the pain and sorrow. And children can go back to normal life early.
Although there has been extensive research on psychological interventions after severe natural disaster, few of them investigated the best time of carrying out psychological interventions. Previous study may pay more attention to all victims, rather than children. Children are special, they have different psychological characteristics of adults. They are sensitive to the change of the natural environment and they are pretty vulnerable. Psychological interventions are essential to them after a severe natural