Dealing with Community Mental Health post the Fukushima disaster: lessons learnt for the COVID-19 pandemic

Under the COVID-19 pandemic, mitigation of psychological distress is required. At present, the demand for remote intervention for the numerous affected people is increasing, and telephonic support can be useful. Since the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, we have been developing a large-scale telephonic support system and implementing brief interventions for the Fukushima people identified at risk of psychological problems such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. In this article, we report the lessons from the Fukushima disaster that can be applied to the COVID-19 pandemic and describe how the telephonic intervention facilitates easier access to psychological help for people with a broad range of psychological distress who are not able to visit treatment or care resources. In our telephonic intervention, we first sent a mental health and lifestyle survey to the people affected by the Fukushima disaster. The counselor team then provided telephonic intervention to high-risk persons as identified on the basis of the survey results. The individuals had expected to receive from the telephonic system help mainly in the form of stress-coping methods, social resource information such as schools, public offices or medical facilities, and lifestyle advice. Since we also experienced that psychological care for telephone counselors was necessary to mitigate the substantial emotional burden, we used the following three approaches: (i) regular supervision of the telephone counseling methods, (ii) seminars for improvement of counseling skills and (iii) individual psychological support. The positive loops between counselors and consulters will help advance a society affected by a disaster.