Disaster preparedness and mental health: understanding psychological responses and support-system demands

Disasters pose a formidable challenge for mental health support services in terms of resources and timely response. This study evaluated the effects of different types of events on the Mexico City population during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, under the assumption that high-resolution time-scale data analysis performed on ICT-based and telehealth systems could contribute to understanding psychological needs and to identifying events associated with short-term outbursts in support demands, estimating their time of occurrence, and the characteristics of calls for service. The study evaluated the effects of public announcements of quarantine measures, mental health press conferences, festivities during 2020, and earthquakes with public early warnings between 2020 and 2023 reported through national public institutions’ databases, the “Screening Tool for Mental Health Problems” and the “Lifeline Emergency Phone Call Service (LEPCS),” comprising 138,471 interactions.

The analysis used qualitative and quantitative methods, including principal component analysis, correlations, and one-way ANOVA. The study successfully identified patterns in responses associated with acute stress, depression, and anxiety, as well as possible times of maximum demand associated with different types of events. Complex scenarios with multiple threats were associated with significant short-term outbursts, posing a challenge to support systems, with a documented case with an increase as high as 2651% on a single day.

The research is novel in its time-scope analysis and event-wise approach, providing valuable insights for emergency planning and resource allocation. Additionally, the study proposes evaluation criteria for detecting potential system overloads in telehealth services to enable early countermeasures. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP24K00327.

The authors want to thank Dr. Juan Manuel Quijada Gaytan, former head of the National Commission for Mental Health and Addictions (Mexico), for helping obtain the necessary data for this research, as well as Abarca Flores Zarahi, León Sánchez Linaloe, Maldonado Vargas Carmen, Ruelas Doroteo Laura Jacqueline, and Tobón Pérez Adriana, members of the SGIRPC social program, for their kind review and comments. Department of Psychology, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico Secretaría de Gestión Integral de Riesgos y Protección Civil, Mexico City, Mexico Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan Genta Nakano, Katsuya Yamori & Astrid Renneé Peralta Gutiérrez Comisión Nacional Antimonopolio, Mexico City, Mexico Faculty of Psychology, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico Research Center for Global Health, Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría, Mexico City, Mexico Hospital General Dr.

Manuel Gea Gonzalez, Mexico City, Mexico Hospital Psiquiatrico Infantil Juan N Navarro, Mexico City, Mexico Correspondence to Carlos Rodrigo Garibay Rubio or Genta Nakano. The authors declare no competing interests. This study analyzed secondary, anonymized data.

The primary data collection for STMH was approved by the UNAM Ethics Committee (FPSI/422/CEIP/157/2020) and the INPRFM Ethics Committee (CEI/C/010/2020), and participants provided informed consent at the time of data entry. The Lifeline dataset contained no personally identifiable information and comprised operational aggregates. No new data requiring consent was collected by the authors for the analysis.