Disaster Psychiatry in Taiwan: A Comprehensive Review

Natural disasters have caused millions of deaths worldwide, and hundreds of millions of people have suffered from various types of physical or mental traumas. Disasters change patterns of thinking and the concept of security among members of a community, which highlights the importance of mental rehabilitation in disaster psychiatry. Mental rehabilitation is not only a short-term intervention, but also involves long-term follow-up and referral of cases to regular psychiatric management. We used PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) to search for papers related to the Chi-Chi Earthquake and the Morakot Typhoon published between January 2001 and November 2011. We found that 33 articles are involved in seven topics. The most common disaster-related psychiatric diagnoses were major depressive episodes and posttraumatic stress disorder. The prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder ranged from 8.0% to 34.3% in Taiwan after the 1999 Earthquake. However, lifetime and current prevalence for psychiatric disorders ranged from 1% to 74%, affecting women twice more than men. Because disasters are becoming increasingly common, it is vital to train a sufficient number of specialists with guidelines for standard clinical treatment, and to create a standard operating procedure for reducing traumatic conditions.