Disaster preparedness and mental health: understanding psychological responses and support-system demands

Disasters pose a formidable challenge for mental health support services in terms of resources and timely response. This study evaluated the effects of different types of events on the Mexico City population during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, under the assumption that high-resolution time-scale data analysis performed on ICT-based and telehealth systems could contribute to understanding psychological needs and to identifying events associated with short-term outbursts in support demands, estimating their time of occurrence, and the characteristics of calls for service. The study evaluated the effects of public announcements of quarantine measures, mental health press conferences, festivities during 2020, and earthquakes with public early warnings between 2020 and 2023 reported through national public institutions’ databases, the “Screening Tool for Mental Health Problems” and the “Lifeline Emergency Phone Call Service (LEPCS),” comprising 138,471 interactions. The analysis used qualitative and quantitative methods, including principal component analysis, correlations, and one-way ANOVA. The study successfully identified patterns in responses associated with acute stress, depression, and anxiety, as well as possible times of maximum demand associated with different types of events. Complex scenarios with multiple threats were associated with significant short-term outbursts, posing a challenge to support systems, with a documented case with an increase as high as 2651% on a single day. The research is novel in its time-scope analysis and event-wise approach, providing valuable insights for emergency planning and resource allocation. Additionally, the study proposes evaluation criteria for detecting potential system overloads in telehealth services to enable early countermeasures.