Long-term psychological outcomes in older adults after disaster: relationships to religiosity and social support

Abstract

Objectives: Natural disasters are associated with catastrophic losses. Disaster survivors return to devastated communities and rebuild homes or relocate permanently, although the long-term psychological consequences are not well understood. The authors examined predictors of psychological outcomes in 219 residents of disaster-affected communities in south Louisiana.

Method: Current coastal residents with severe property damage from the 2005 Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and exposure to the 2010 British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill were compared and contrasted with former coastal residents and an indirectly affected control group. Participants completed measures of storm exposure and stressors, religiosity, perceived social support, and mental health.

Results: Non-organizational religiosity was a significant predictor of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in bivariate and multivariate logistic regressions. Follow-up analyses revealed that more frequent participation in non-organizational religious behaviors was associated with a heightened risk of PTSD. Low income and being a coastal fisher were significant predictors of depression symptoms in bivariate and multivariate models. Perceived social support had a protective effect for all mental health outcomes, which also held for symptoms of depression and GAD in multivariate models.

Conclusion: People who experienced recent and severe trauma related to natural and technological disasters are at risk for adverse psychological outcomes in the years after these events. Individuals with low income, low social support, and high levels of non-organizational religiosity are also at greater risk. Implications of these data for current views on the post-disaster psychological reactions and the development of age-sensitive interventions to promote long-term recovery are discussed.

Keywords:

• natural and technological disasters
• post-disaster mental health
• post-traumatic stress
• long-term recovery
• British Petroleum oil spill
• environmental loss

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Sr. Mary Keefe and Fr. John Arnone of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Violet, LA for their assistance with recruitment. We thank Susan McNeil and Janet Hood of the St. Bernard Council on Aging, Sean Warner of the Gulf Coast Trust Bank in St. Bernard, and Todd Hamilton of Catholic Charities in Baton Rouge for their assistance and providing space for testing. We thank Kelli Broome, Susan Brigman, Mary Beth Tamor, Benjamin Staab, and Annie Crapanzano for their help with data collection and Kayla Holland, Beth Lyon, and Yaxin Lu for assistance with data scoring. We thank George Barisich, Gayle Buckley, Catherine Serpas, Eva Vudnovich, and Erin Walker for their contribution to the research effort. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Notes

1 Any symptom of depression was indicated when one or more of the eight symptoms on the PHQ-9 was endorsed as a 2 or higher (‘more than half of the days’), or if the last symptom (‘Thoughts that you would be better off dead or hurting yourself in some way’) was endorsed as a 1 or higher (‘several days’), after Kroenke et al. (2001).

2 Cherry et al. (2011) reported four separate dimensions of religiosity. Because religious beliefs and practices (three questions) and religious coping (two questions) were strongly intercorrelated (r = 0.83), we combined these dimensions to form a single religious beliefs and coping dimension (five questions) in this study.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the Louisiana Board of Regents and the BP Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, Office of Research and Economic Development, Louisiana State University. This support is gratefully acknowledged.