Humanity loves to explore and to live in new places. Part of settling afresh is providing mental health and psychosocial support, including for disasters. Many new places are expected to be so different from our current abodes, that new approaches to disaster mental health and psychosocial support will be needed, since current knowledge is inadequate to understand future needs.
On Earth, future communities could be in Antarctica (on or within the ice), underwater, on open water surfaces—anchored or floating cities roaming the oceans—deep underground, or drifting through the air. Speculations and templates exist in science as well as fiction, from humanity living underground in the movie 12 Monkeys to the floating island in the air in the novel Gulliver’s Travels.
While extensive crisis-related mental health work exists for those currently living in Antarctica and for those traveling on ships and in aircraft, all these situations are temporary. When something goes seriously wrong, the preferred response is to get to safety and then address mental health and psychosocial issues. The difference for the future is that those locations will be people’s homes to which they would wish to return after a disaster.
It is the same for humanity developing off-Earth settlements: on planets, on moons, among asteroids and comets, and in space stations. People travelling to outer space undergo extensive psychological testing before they are permitted to enter the spacecraft and they know that the key to an emergency is getting back to Earth. The recent air leak on the International Space Station meant that astronauts evacuated to an attached shuttle, ready to cast off to return to their home planet. People living in outer space would need mental health and psychosocial support tailored to them, without the assumption that arriving on Earth means safety–or is even possible.
Tomorrow’s Disaster Mental Health Needs
Today, disaster response is often premised on being able to evacuate to a safe location where mental health and psychosocial support could be provided. Emergency settlements underwater or underground, floating in the air or on water, in freezing climates, or in outer space usually preclude easy evacuation. We need much more research to understand deeply human psychological responses in situations in which one’s home is threatened with destruction and there is no hope for escape.
Global nuclear war is one speculative scenario which has been studied over decades. Then, on 13 January 2018, a warning was inadvertently sent to all mobile phones in Hawai’i that a missile was approaching the state. Another message was sent 38 minutes later, indicating that the original was a mistake. Principal responses included seeking confirmation, aimlessness, and fatalism.
Perhaps it would be the same for Antarctic humanitarianism, when a future Antarctic city experiences a catastrophe during the winter and the residents know that stepping outside kills rapidly. Such settlements should have contingencies designed in for safe evacuation. It is hard to ascertain how reliable and relied on these plans would be, given the lack of precedents.
Much the same could be expected for people needing to evacuate from underwater, underground, airborne, or outer space abodes. Without adequate contingency designed in, there might be no hope for escape. Submarine sinkings, cave disasters, and phone calls from hijacked aircraft offer a rare window into the hope that those trapped have of rescue and survival. In future human settlements, no external assistance might be feasible before it is too late.
How possible is it to provide sufficient mental health and psychosocial support for situations in which a population knows they and their entire community will soon perish? How could we step out of our comfort zone to consider populations who have known nothing except always living in circumstances in which any major emergency is likely lethal?
Post-Human-Itarian Disaster Mental Health
After all, people born and growing up in these new environments must be culturally different to their settler parents. Then, the pioneers pass away, leaving a society that has known only their Antarctic, ocean, underground, airborne, or off-Earth realms.
Their disaster psychosocial and mental health needs must diverge extensively from today’s knowledge. New theories will develop and disaster actions taken or advocated for today would be less relevant for these generations. We can speculate now, while recognising that drawing on existing knowledge must be inadequate for the future.
Perhaps underground, underwater, or airborne peoples could never evacuate to the Earth’s surface while remaining mentally healthy. Perhaps as part of their culture, outer space, underwater, and in-ice communities accept that they would be wiped out rather than trying for safety.
The timescales required for roaming between stars and galaxies effectively preclude rapid external disaster aid and any form of rescue (unless we develop time travel or faster-than-light travel). Those timescales mean that a human society taking a deep space voyage without cryogenic sleep will evolve into a new culture and eventually a new species.
In this post-human society with a completely different psychological makeup to humanity today, the thought of “human”-itarianism to them might be as alien as they are to us.