Individual Reactions to Community Disaster

Psychiatric phenomena with respect to individual behavior under stress can be considered to lie along 4 main axes—the natural history of the process, reactions and factors at various stages of the process, and the psychodynamics of the interrelationships between reactions and factors in the continuum. 2. The natural history of individual behavior in acute community disasters that have been studied has been briefly described. This appears to fall into 3 overlapping phases—a period of impact, a period of recoil, and a posttraumatic period—each of which can be characterized according to stress, time, and psychological phenomena. 3. The relevance of the natural history method for this particular investigation and for psychiatric research in general has been briefly discussed.