The Psychology of Disasters: How People Respond to Crisis
The United States is facing more disaster situations each year, with less time between them to prepare for the next. According to Climate Central, 2025 was the third-highest year for billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, just behind 2023 and 2024. Between 2023 and 2025, the United States went fewer than 20 days between billion-dollar disasters.
People respond to crises in a variety of ways, but emergency management professionals can learn to identify predictable patterns to better help those dealing with disasters. Earning a Master of Science in Disaster Resilience Leadership (MS-DRL) teaches these professionals about the psychology of disasters and how to use that knowledge to provide better support.
The Timeline of Disaster Psychology
The psychology of disasters can be broken down into four phases: pre-storm, heroic, disillusionment, and reconstruction. Although individuals may have different experiences in each phase, this timeline predicts general behavior.
Pre-Storm: Before Disaster Strikes
Consider the proverbial calm before the storm. Is it really calm? Not for those who know they may be in harm’s way.
The rise of early warning system (EWS) technology has been essential for helping communities prepare before disasters occur. These systems transmit messages via email, phone, text, television, and radio to offer residents important information to help their safety and survival. But those messages often trigger a survival or stress response.
The stress response causes a physical change that is important for helping individuals respond to crises. Sometimes known as the fight or flight response (or broken down further into the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response), this bodily change activates the sympathetic nervous system, a part of the autonomic nervous system.
When the sympathetic nervous system is activated, we experience increased heart rate, faster breathing, pupil dilation, and a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline, all of which help us prepare to either face or flee from a threat.
Its counterpart is the parasympathetic nervous system, which alerts the body when a threat is gone and it can return to “rest and digest” mode.
Heroic: Taking Control of the Situation and Fostering Togetherness
After senses are heightened, focus is narrowed, and other survival strategies are activated by a flood of stress hormones, the next stage is when people face the oncoming challenge head-on. This stage is often called the heroic phase, as many members of the community step up to offer support to their friends and neighbors.
It can also be called the togetherness phase, as communities often find a sense of kinship and camaraderie when they face disasters together. Families of different backgrounds may find a sense of connection over their shared collective trauma, improving the sense of safety that is often destroyed by facing the trauma alone. Communities come together to reestablish safety and find support among others who understand what they have been through.
Disillusionment: The Togetherness Breakdown
That burst of togetherness typically gives way to a more discouraging stage, often known as the disillusionment phase. As communities are still experiencing a crisis or shortly after it has passed, frustration and depression can rise, with many people looking for someone to blame as they try to make sense of what happened and why.
In this phase, it’s common for individuals to feel disconnected from others, look for scapegoats, and blame government officials for lack of support.
Reconstruction: Rebuilding and Returning to “Normal”
In this phase, emotions typically begin to balance out as community members work to return to normalcy.
The community may never fully return to what it once was. However, with the right support, community members can return to lives where they feel fully engaged and fulfilled, with infrastructure rebuilding and social connections reforming. This phase may take months or even years, and its length depends significantly on the community’s disaster resilience.
But recovery isn’t just about rebuilding bridges and draining floodwaters — it also involves addressing community members’ mental and physical health. For some, the initial stress response can turn into something far more debilitating, leading to chronic illnesses, cognitive decline, and even premature death. Disasters can also lead to disruption of healthcare access, hazardous environmental conditions, and housing insecurity.
Those most affected by these infrastructure challenges are also most likely to experience long-term mental health complications, like anxiety and depression. Crisis leadership must address both the mental and physical challenges of disasters to ensure that communities have the resilience to return to a sense of normalcy for the sake of their long-term health.
Understanding the Psychology of Disasters as Nonlinear
In general, most frameworks in psychology are nonlinear, although they are often misrepresented as linear. For instance, those experiencing grief don’t often move from one stage to the next in a perfect order and may repeat stages.
We can think about the stages of the psychology of disasters in the same way. While these stages can help disaster recovery professionals understand the psychological experiences of people who’ve experienced disasters, many individuals and communities experience these stages differently. Like grief sufferers, they may also repeat stages or move between stages differently.
The Importance of Trauma-Informed Care and Psychological First Aid in Disaster Leadership
Disasters can result in negative psychological consequences for communities and individuals. An empirical review of disaster recovery studies found that nearly one-third of people may experience a negative mental health condition after a disaster, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety.
For some, that immediate aftermath of a disaster may be when they need the most psychological support. Some people may experience extreme distress, which may harm their ability to function during a crucial moment in which they need to focus on achieving safety for themselves and their loved ones.
While we often think of first aid as addressing someone’s physical needs during a time of crisis, more and more first responders and crisis response teams are being trained in Psychological First Aid (PFA), a framework developed by the National Center for PTSD and the National Child Traumatic Stress Network that attempts to reduce distress in people immediately after a disaster. The goals of PFA are to:
- Establish human connection in a non-intrusive, comforting way
- Demonstrate immediate and ongoing safety for the survivor
- Provide emotional and physical comfort
- Emotionally orient distraught survivors and reduce distress
- Listen to a survivor’s immediate needs and concerns
- Offer practical assistance and information to get survivors to safety
- Connect survivors with social support networks
It’s also worth acknowledging that mental health conditions do not always immediately occur following a disaster. Some conditions develop or worsen over time, demonstrating that psychological care is essential at every stage of the psychology of disasters, including well into the reconstruction stage.
Understanding that disasters have a traumatic effect is essential for ensuring that communities receive the trauma-informed care they need. Trauma affects every facet of our lives, from our physical health to our ability to form close connections with others. To ignore trauma in disaster recovery would be to ignore the unique needs of a community that is experiencing an event that may have changed lives drastically.
Disasters also have a unique ability to create collective trauma rather than only individual trauma. Perhaps that is why multiple studies have found that community-based post-disaster recovery is particularly beneficial in improving both community well-being and individual mental health. It’s also why the PFA framework emphasizes the need to connect survivors with social support as soon as possible after a disaster. Taking a community-based recovery approach boosts social cohesion, which improves community resilience and overall community psychological health.
Help Communities Face Disasters With Tulane University
The psychology of disasters typically follows predictable steps, from the pre-storm stress response through to a returning sense of normalcy. A strong disaster resilience plan helps communities recover quicker and more fully. When communities have the tools to combat both the mental and physical challenges of disasters, they face fewer long-term mental health complications and find their feet faster.
Tulane School of Social Work’s Master of Science in Disaster Resilience Leadership (MS-DRL) is the only program in the U.S. with a focus on FEMA’s National Disaster Recovery Framework. Graduates have gone on to be essential resilience leaders, working across government agencies and non-profits to help struggling communities rebuild.
Start your career in emergency management with Tulane School of Social Work.
Recommended Readings
MSW Concentrations: Specializing Your Practice
Disaster Recovery Policy Explained
Sources:
Climate Central, “2025 in Review: U.S. Billion-Dollar Disasters”
Domestic Preparedness, “The Psychology of Crisis”
Healthcare, “Impact of Natural Disasters on Mental Health: Evidence and Implications”
Psychology Tools, “Fight or Flight Response”
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Psychological First Aid: Field Operations Guide