Two major storms have hit Hawaiʻi since the spring, and others have come close. Structural damage has been extensive in places, but the entire state has shared another experience: disaster fatigue.
Repeated large-scale events that hit an area in a short amount of time, many of which are often traumatic, can cause a sense of hopelessness, confusion and intense exhaustion, especially when the next disaster hits before a community has fully recovered.
Haylin Dennison, a licensed therapist and crisis specialist on Oʻahu, said this state of mind among Hawaiʻi residents stretches back far before Hurricane Lala or March's Kona lows.
“Disasters and crises are over long before our body and our mind can recover,” Dennison said. “What our bodies are not meant to do is to be prolonged in this crisis state. We are not made to handle that kind of hypervigilant state for months or years, and that's why you start to see people breaking down physically.”
She added that immediately following a traumatic event, the body and mind are in a state of survival. Tasks such as insurance claims and applying for state or federal assistance are often expected of people shortly after disaster strikes, but Dennison said the brain is not equipped to take on additional responsibilities aside from simply “staying afloat.”
“When we're in what we call ‘fight-or-flight,’ other things will start to shut down, and that can make it harder to concentrate, to plan, to remember things, how to regulate your emotions — all of which are the exact skills we need when we're trying to rebuild a community,” she said. “And we're expecting people to do all these things while they're in this hypervigilant state? That’s where the biology does not make sense.”
Cari Cullen, the program officer for domestic funds at the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, described disaster recovery as a “rollercoaster” of a process, adding that both the physical and emotional recovery are not linear processes that can be measured in time.
“Oftentimes communities may feel like they’ve come out of the thick of it and are on the path to healing, just to be hit with another threat or complication,” Cullen said. “Recovery is not just about the infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt, but it’s about people coming back to a place of feeling safe, secure and whole and having the stability and the things that they need in order to really thrive.”
Next steps
Both Cullen and Dennison said the most important thing in disaster recovery is community and people to rely on.
Cullen added that no one can operate at 100% capacity for an extended amount of time without risking burnout. She said it may help to think of recovery as a relay race rather than a sprint or marathon, stating that community members, state leadership and other partners will have to step up at different times to help everyone through.
“One of the things to figure out is how to get philanthropy into the system, which can come from large institutional donors, individuals or nonprofits,” she said. “It's really about making sure that there's that there's the people at the table and we're advocating for each other, on behalf of each other, alongside each other, and then providing access to resources wherever we can.”
Dennison emphasized the importance of returning to a baseline nervous system in order to function and process outside of a heightened survival state. She wants people to know that no one should be ashamed of resting or of asking for help, explaining that residents are not able to help neighbors, friends or family without also helping themselves.
“The thing that I'm the most proud of in Hawaiʻi is that we see people coming together to help each other out, whether or not state or federal resources come,” Dennison said. “That aloha has been preserved for so long and has been ingrained in all of us who have grown up on these islands. No matter what, we put our differences aside to come up and help in the moment.”
