Mass Disasters and Children’s Mental Health: How General Systems Theory and Behavioral Economics Can Help

The chapters in this book have each focused on particular disasters and have described the unique and often remarkable efforts that arose during these disasters in order to respond to children’s mental health needs. In each chapter, we have found invaluable lessons about successes, failures, and the striving of caring professionals to utilize existing resources and expertise to best mitigate negative outcomes for the children of these disasters (we use the term “children” to refer to children and adolescents). These case examples make possible the next phase in disaster research and policy, which we believe will involve abstraction from the individual disaster experiences. This abstraction will allow the creation of theoretical models that identify the key common features of disasters, effective responses to them, and the salient common interactions between these features. In this chapter, we will introduce two promising paradigms, general systems theory (GST) and behavioral economics (BE), which may supply the intellectual architecture for the feature extraction and theoretical abstraction that constitute the next stage of progress in disaster management. By utilizing (GST) and (BE), and applying their toolboxes, we will be better able to understand the common anatomy of disasters and discover common principles for dealing with their consequence in general and their impact on children’s mental health in particular.