In the weeks and months following major disasters, long after the initial stabilization of medical and social relief efforts are in place, and the media attention tapers off, there exists an emerging, long-term effort in dealing with the psychosocial effects of death, injury, grief and loss. However, the global provision of mental health care varies in its organization and effectiveness from region to region, often being reactive rather than proactive. Furthermore, to be effective, psychological first aid must be culturally sensitive and relevant. We realize that Western psychology must be locally interpreted to be relevant or appropriate in many regions of the world. While other relief organizations seek to provide outside service to survivors of disaster, it is PsyCorps’ mission to help regions prone to natural or man made disaster create and develop their own teams to provide psychological first aid services and psychological support directly to survivors and caregivers in the aftermath of critical incidents and disaster.

Our interest is to empower local regions towards setting up, developing and training culturally indigenous teams.

Our objective is for this to be a collaborative effort especially as it relates to the cross-cultural applications of providing psychological support.

Our goal is for psychological support teams to be set in place in a designated region, organized, prepared and ready for mobilization to address the psychosocial aspects emerging from disaster relief and reconstruction work, targeting survivors, first responders and caregivers.

The vision of PsyCorps is to create a global community of culturally indigenous psychological support teams that are inter-connected and prepared beforehand to respond to the acute and long-term psychological effects of disaster survivors, first responders and caregivers.

To learn more about the rationale and operational aspects of PsyCorps, please click here for a PowerPoint synopsis of our mission.