How Therapists Can Responsibly Support Disaster Mental Health: An Interview with Dr. Shannon Goodhue, LCSW, PhD
Curt and Katie chat with Dr. Shannon Goodhue on how therapists can ethically support communities during crises and disasters, what disaster mental health actually involves, and the importance of training, boundaries, and prevention work in crisis response.
Click here to scroll to the podcast transcript.Transcript
(Show notes provided in collaboration with Otter.ai and ChatGPT.)
About Our Guest: Dr. Shannon Goodhue
Shannon Goodhue is currently the Senior Program Manager, Disaster Mental Health at the American Red Cross. She is responsible for providing programmatic oversight and support for the nationwide Disaster Mental Health team. Prior to joining the American Red Cross, she served as the Director of Disaster Behavioral Health for Washington, D.C. As part of that role she also served as the Behavioral Health Liaison to the Metropolitan Police Department, the Chair of the Behavioral Health Subcommittee of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, and as the behavioral health representative on various disaster planning groups.
Prior to her position with D.C. government, she worked as a trauma and grief therapist in community mental health settings, outpatient therapy clinics, high schools, and juvenile jail. While working at the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing in Washington, D.C., she designed and created a mental health team that responded to homicide scenes with law enforcement. She is also a former volunteer firefighter/EMT in Virginia.
She earned a B.A. with a dual major in Sociology and Technical Theatre from Marymount Manhattan College, a Master of Social Work from NYU, and a PhD in International Psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. She is a licensed social worker in Washington, D.C. and Virginia. She currently lives in Virginia with her husband, very energetic toddler, and mischievous cat.
In this podcast episode: How Therapists Can Responsibly Support Disaster Mental Health
We invited Dr. Shannon Goodhue onto the podcast because of her deep expertise in disaster behavioral health and her leadership at the American Red Cross. With wildfires, hurricanes, and community tragedies on the rise, therapists often want to jump in and help—but not all help is helpful. Shannon helps us unpack what ethical, competent disaster mental health work actually looks like.
Key Takeaways for Therapists: Ethical Disaster Mental Health Response and Volunteer Readiness
“It’s unethical to approach somebody as if you’re forming a long-term relationship when you’re not. You’re going to be there for somewhere between three minutes and an hour—maybe you’ll see them a second time. And then you’re going to connect them to someone who will be that long-term support.” – Dr. Shannon Goodhue
- Disaster mental health is about crisis stabilization, short-term support, and connecting survivors to resources—not ongoing therapy
- Most people impacted by disaster recover through natural supports like community, family, and faith—not necessarily clinical treatment
- Therapists should avoid stepping into disaster settings without training, vetting, or an organizational structure
- Red Cross training focuses on short-term interventions, team-based support, and scope-of-practice ethics
- Prevention and resilience-building in communities are essential to future disaster readiness
- Deployment can be virtual, local, or national, depending on clinician capacity
- There are many ways to help—but timing, training, and ethical clarity are key
“The shelter is a person’s bedroom. Would you let anybody just walk through your bedroom without vetting, without credentialing? We can’t. That’s irresponsible.” – Dr. Shannon Goodhue
Resources on Disaster Mental Health and Red Cross Volunteering
We’ve pulled together resources mentioned in this episode and put together some handy-dandy links. Please note that some of the links below may be affiliate links, so if you purchase after clicking below, we may get a little bit of cash in our pockets. We thank you in advance!
- American Red Cross Volunteer Page
- FEMA: Disaster Mental Health Overview (general emergency management framework)
- Psychological First Aid – National Child Traumatic Stress Network
Relevant Episodes of MTSG Podcast:
How Therapists Can Truly Help After a Disaster
Treating First Responders, An Interview with Yael Shuman, LMFT
MTSG Podcast Episodes on Crisis Management
Meet the Hosts: Curt Widhalm & Katie Vernoy
Curt Widhalm, LMFT
Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com
Katie Vernoy, LMFT
Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com
A Quick Note:
Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.
Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.
Join the Modern Therapist Community:
Podcast Homepage | Therapy Reimagined Homepage
Facebook | Facebook Group | Instagram | YouTube
Consultation services with Curt Widhalm or Katie Vernoy:
Connect with the Modern Therapist Community:
Our Facebook Group – The Modern Therapists Group
Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:
Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/
Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/
Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):
… 0:00
(Opening Advertisement)
Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy.
Curt Widhalm 0:15
Welcome back, modern therapists. This is the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy, and this is the podcast for therapists about the things that go on in our world, the things that happens in the mental health space. And we had an episode a couple of months ago around the Los Angeles fires that Katie and I and our communities were affected by, and some of the marketing strategies around that, and we’ll include a link to that in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com, we had made reference in that episode to this episode, and this is just about becoming a person who can provide disaster mental health services. And one of the more amazing organizations that is out there to do this kind of work is the American Red Cross, and we are so fortunate today to be joined by Dr. Shannon Goodhue, licensed clinical social worker, who is here to talk to us about all of the ways that we can become prepared to go and provide competent services when there is a call to action for mental health. So thank you so much for joining us today Dr. Goodhue.
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 1:23
Thank you. I’m honored to be here.
Katie Vernoy 1:26
I am so glad you’re here. I think we felt definitely the benefit of the American Red Cross here in Los Angeles, recently, I had seen a webinar you did with AAMFT, and I felt that what you had put forward was so great, and I really wanted us to make sure that we could share it with our share it with our audience. So thank you so much for being here. The first question we ask everyone is, who are you and what are you putting out into the world?
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 1:52
I knew you were going to ask this, because I am a listener, so I felt inept to answer. And I started asking around, and I people were generous in their response to me, I have to say, and landed in listen first and then never shut up. So my social work background, right? Let me, let me hear your story. Let me hear what you need. Let me hear what’s going on. And then I’m going to go everywhere and argue with people about that. So people on the front end of that tend to like me, and people on the back end of that tend to find me a real thorn in the side. But I think that is social work. You know, I went on to get a PhD in psychology, and it was very fascinating look at those two things side by side. But it’s my social worker background that says, No, you you fight for people, you fight for what they need. So that’s what I’ve been putting out there.
Curt Widhalm 2:48
So it’s always helpful when we frame kind of the episode, and when we’re talking about disaster mental health, what goes into what is disaster mental health? What are we talking about in this episode, what kind of services does this mean, and what is the bigger picture of it?
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 3:06
So it’s a big question. So, disaster mental health, if you look at it as a whole field, it’s a it’s a specialty, right, in serving people who have survived disasters. It weaves in a bunch of trauma work, grief work, crisis work, things like that, but weaves them together in a specific way. So, disaster mental health follows the overall disaster framework. You can read about a lot on, say, FEMA or other websites, other emergency management areas, but we look at response, recovery and prevention. So response, when we think of the broader emergency management world is firefighters and police officers and those people who go in the moment that it happens. And in mental health, we do that too, and that’s crisis work. It’s stabilizing people. It’s trying to get them to immediate resources. It is looking for people who are having immediate safety issues because of a mental health reason, and supporting that. Then the broader field of disastermental health does a lot of recovery work, and recovery in the broader emergency management world is rebuilding houses and fixing roads and that kind of work. And for us, that’s therapy, yeah, and that can go on for years, right? Some people will never recover from the things that have happened to them, but most people will. Some people need therapy to do that. So in the mental health world, that’s recovery for us. Prevention in larger emergency management, right, is about making sure your floodplains are clear and you’re you’re doing things to keep people from being harmed when the disaster, the natural disaster, arrived. For us, it is a building field to look at prevention and disaster mental health, right? How do you build resilience in communities so that when they’re impacted, they can manage better as a community? How do you build resilience in individuals so that when the traumatic event arrives, they are better able, better prepared, to respond to it themselves with their internal resources. It’s a growing edge for this field. I think we spend, especially lately, a lot of time in response and recovery. But now we’re starting to have bigger conversations about prevention. One good part of that is that in a lot of places, mental health is wrapped into the emergency management space. And I was very lucky to serve in that role for one of the bigger cities in the US. And I would sit in drills where they were talking about, you know, this is how we’re going to do it. We’re going to take the people and we’re going to do this, and we’re going to do that, we’re going to move them here and and I would go, that’s not gonna work. People, people don’t do that. They don’t think that way. If that was happening to you, is that what you would do? And they would go, Oh no, right? So in prevention, we’re also hoping to put that human element into the very technical elements of emergency response that are about saving lives and saving property, but to say there’s a better way to do that that hopefully doesn’t cause as much trauma or that can mitigate some of those effects. So disaster mental health works across those spaces, and I would say it’s growing edge all over to understand that, but a growing edge where, unfortunately, more and more and more worldwide places, certainly American cities, are seeing, seeing the need.
Katie Vernoy 6:36
That’s really interesting. I hadn’t heard about the prevention part, and I love that. I think we’ll probably revisit that later, but I wanted to ask the question that sometimes we’ll ask at the beginning of the episode, you know, kind of a framing of why we need to pay attention. And this is in a learning place, not a shaming place, but what do therapists get wrong about disaster mental health?
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 7:01
I thought about this a lot, and I will say probably the primary thing is that they think everyone will need them. And so you see these kind of overestimate. And I was very connected to New York during 911 and there were these very giant estimates of how many people were going to have PTSD. It didn’t really pan out that way, because there are so many mitigating factors that help people recover. And the research varies a bit on this, but generally you want to think roughly 10% of directly impacted people are going to develop a long term need for mental health. So you have a large short term, immediate crisis need, and then it’s gonna people are gonna manage themselves. The vast majority of people will get better without a professional mental health resource. They’ll turn to their faith communities, their families, their friends, their other community resources, and they’ll heal together. So we have to be careful to not insert ourselves into places that are community healing environments that don’t need us, which is sometimes hard, and then make sure we’re available for those individuals who really need us, because those individuals are going to be deeply impacted, and many of them for years to come.
Curt Widhalm 8:19
In the delivery of mental health services, how does that immediate response look different from the traditional therapy that many therapists are trained in?
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 8:30
So, response work is a crisis based work. It is a short term intervention. In the Red Cross we do one to three sessionsmaximum and interactions maximum. We are not establishing a long term relationship with this person, because they’re going to go back to their regular life and they’re going to need their regular resources in your short term volunteer, right? So it is a short term solution focused intervention for people who need that. We support our responders, because a lot of Red Cross volunteers really struggle with the suffering that they see when they go out to work in a shelter or to feed people, to do those those other jobs. So we support them. We do a decent amount of work with people who have a pre existing mental health concern. And so that can look very simple if their community resources are intact in terms of connecting them to their providers, making sure their providers have access to them in shelters. It can look very complicated if the external community that has been destroyed. So if you think about a Katrina where most of that city, or large parts of the city are taken out, that’s a much more difficult support, and you have to really work for resources for that. But basically we walk around and we talk to people in shelters, on street corners, where they’re giving out supplies, where they are having community meetings where they’re giving people horrible information. We go and we work the crowd, and we talk to people and vigils and say, how are you how are you holding up? How is this going? So you don’t have a desk, you don’t have an office, you don’t have appointments, you don’t have the ability to form a long term relationship, you are immediately asking people you know, are you okay, right? Are you safe? Are you eating? Are you sleeping? Who are you going to turn to for support in the next couple of days? Who do you have around you that you trust? Those kinds of immediate intervention questions and that kind of work. So it looks very different from an office.
Katie Vernoy 10:50
But also seems very different from therapy. It seems like there’s this, this element of a somewhat informed, well meaning person could do something similar. So what is the what is the need for a therapist or a social worker to be in this role of walking through and working the crowd? What do therapists add to this?
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 11:15
So it’s interesting, and I will say, a lot of places in the world, a lot of other Red Cross sister societies, and I’ve talked to a lot of them, also believe that, right, if we train our shelter workers, our feeding workers in psychological first aid, then they can go do this stuff. But what happens is it’s very easy to get over your head with a person who’s just been traumatized and regular workers who are not mental health professionals do not feel comfortable there. They do not want to say, I think this person’s safe, or I think I need to call 911. They don’t want to say, I’m just going to walk away after hearing your story, but I don’t really think you’re okay, right? They want that ability to reach to somebody to say, Can you please make sure this person’s all right? And that is a level of professionalism that an actual trained mental health provider can bring to that moment, and that’s critical. And when I talked, I talked to a lot of other organizations who really look at the psychological first aid model, which is a lay person’s training in sort of basic emotional support. And they say, yeah, that’s kind of what we focus on, but we shouldn’t just have that. And what they do is they tend to bring in mental health people from other places to come to that disaster event and try to work with the people. But it isn’t a defined practice that they’ve been trained in at that point. And so it gets very, it gets very hinky.
… 12:47
(Advertisement Break)
Curt Widhalm 12:51
I’m sure that there’s all kinds of questions that we’re going to get to, but as you’re bringing it up, what is the American Red Cross training like in preparation for something like that deployment.
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 13:03
I think it’s very interesting, but I’m biased, of course. So Red Cross training you do a fundamentals training, and that has a lot of logistics in it. For sure, you know, how do you sign up and what are you going to do? And you know, how do you talk to leadership and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but it has a clinical component. And what that does is say, We know you have all these skills, right, like you have this broad range of skills, but here’s where we need you to narrow them down and focus focus on these skills, these, you know, distributing this kind of support, doing it this, this way, making sure you’re not forgetting X, Y and Z, and you know, sort of framing your mind around how to respond in a short term solution focused way, and pull you back from your skills in developing long term relationships. And why, you know, we’re gonna talk about, the training talks about, why? Why don’t we do that, why don’t we use those skills? And there’s good reasons. It’s unethical to approach somebody as if you’re forming a long term relationship when you’re not, right. You’re just going to be there for somewhere between three minutes and an hour. Maybe you’ll see them a second time, and then you’re going to turn them, you’re going to connect them to somebody who’s going to be that long term support, right? So trainings really, what does that mean? What does that mean? And then we also going to be looking at trainings this year for our people, because it is really a generalist practice, but you have to have a decent amount of knowledge across a lot of spans. And right now, we do that through teamwork, because our professionals, our volunteers, come from all lanes of professional practice, so they’re able to rely on each other. But you do have to understand children. You have to understand severe mental illness presentations. You have to understand de-escalating a person in a psychotic state. You have to understand suicide assessment. There’s a lot of things you could be called to do, and you’ll be working as a team. Say, Ah, that’s not my expertise. Hey, you know that’s so and so’s expertise. Like, let’s work together to help this person. So we’ll be doing some training in that too, to kind of just bring up the whole cadres level of generalist knowledge.
Katie Vernoy 15:23
When the most recent crisis happened here with the fires, as we were talking before the we hit record, there was a lot of folks where I’m where I live, because we’re enough out of it where we weren’t directly impacted. We had the smoke. We had a lot of potentially clients or other people who had been impacted, but we had some resources in I think a lot of fields, and so there were definitely folks wanting to reach out to head over to the evacuation shelters and start helping people. And there was discuss of discussion of this is within my scope of practice. I can do this. There was also some mention of a very short term crisis response EMDR practice that apparently they thought would be good. And there was so many different ways that they wanted to show up, and it felt like maybe that would wreak a little havoc. And so I just wanted to ask what your response is, and what, what’s needed there, and what, what’s helpful, what’s harmful, for local therapists who have some bandwidth who want to jump in, who aren’t Red Cross volunteers?
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 16:46
Yeah, absolutely. So first I just want to affirm that, right? I live not far from a National Airport, and there was a plane crash there, and I was like, I’m getting in my car, right? So I want to just affirm that we mostly all feel about our local community, right, like I know what I can do. I can get there, I can help, and that is great. Let me give it to you from the shelter’s point of view; the shelter, I think, was brilliantly described to me not that long ago, actually is a person’s bedroom. Now it’s the bedroom of 100 people. Could be the bedroom of 1000 people, but it’s their bedroom. Would you feel it was right to have anybody in the area go knock on someone’s bedroom door, walk in and say, I’m here to help, without any vetting, without any credentialing. You may be very competent to support that person. Do you think everybody who would show up and say they were competent is competent? Would you feel confident to let everyone in the door without any vetting or background checking or license verifications, right? What door does that open that makes people living in those spaces more vulnerable? Right? We’re not going to let anybody walk through your bedroom. We can’t. That’s irresponsible. There are a lot of avenues and and Red Cross brought on 50 local people during the LA wild fires, for instance. So you can go to redcross.org and you can sign up when it’s in your neighborhood, and we will train you and send you out in your neighborhood right now for this event. So you have that option, but we’re going to background check you, and we’re going to check your license and make sure that you are a legitimate professional. We’re going to give you our fundamentals training so you understand what you’re walking into in terms of the system of emergency response and the clinical practice that’s ethical and not ethical when you walk into a space like that, right? We’re going to give you that information and then, great, come join us, please, right? And if you are interested in being an EMDR therapist, there are organizations that do that, right? There are organizations that do long term therapy for disaster survivors. There are many places to go to raise your hand, right? We also worked with, I think, six local mental health providers in the LA area who we worked with them as an organization, and they sent us their qualified people who went into that work as well. So Red Cross isn’t trying to come in and say, Get out of our way. We’re trying to come in and say, right, please let’s everybody who’s qualified come to the table and work together, but I’m just not gonna let anybody walk into the shelter.
Katie Vernoy 19:44
What about the type of of treatments that might be, like when might those, those actual like EMDR, or some of these other things, when might those actually be appropriate? Because it seems like walking into someone’s bedroom and saying, here and I’m doing the back and forth of the EMDR, that seems too early, and it seems pretty invasive and kind of potentially violating, as you described. So when are those things more appropriate?
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 20:13
So we take the stance that when a person’s just been immediately impacted, right, their whole life is turned upside down, and they don’t have a home. Maybe someone they love has died. We aren’t going to come in with a with an intervention, you know, long that requires a bit of a relationship, that requires some assurance of safety and security. We’re not going to we’re not going to do that. We’re stabilizing you, but then we’re going to refer you. And just like anybody and any any client who’s coming into the space, there’s an element of their own self determination of when they are ready to engage the therapeutic process. I will tell you that’s very rarely week one, week two, week four, if it’s been a really horrific event for them. People need a minute, you know, you need a minute to find out where you’re going to live, how you’re going to feed your kids, where are they going to school? Your life is very full with trying to just re-establish order, but we give people those resources and say when you’re ready call this, you know, here’s a list of people to call in your local area that can help you. Here’s where you can look up services. Here’s where you can connect. We recommend that you do right. And then people decide for themselves when they’re ready to engage in that.
… 21:35
(Advertisement Break)
Curt Widhalm 21:36
For clinicians who are wanting to get involved in this kind of work, we saw a lot in our community who were like, Katie was saying, like you were saying, I’m ready to go and, you know, be boots on the ground kind of thing. How long does this training process take? When Should people get trained? Because I’m imagining that as the crisis is happening, especially in local areas, Red Cross is getting a lot of interest in getting trained, but are people realistically going to get trained in time to help out for that disaster?
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 22:09
So let me put it this way, we are still, you know, as of this taping six, five weeks after the fires, we’re still there. So are you going to get to go day one? No, right? It’s going to take a little bit longer to get your paperwork through, right? We have to make sure that you are who you say you are, and that you are qualified, and then, you know, schedule you for a training. But can you be there in a week? Yeah, you know, and we’re still going to be there. I think people assume that when it hits the news cycle, that’s the only time that there’s need and when it’s out of the news cycle, that means it’s resolved. Nothing could be further from the truth. These things go on for months and months and months. You know, Helene hit, hurricane Helene hit in the beginning of October. We wrapped services at the end of December. So people have ongoing people in shelters a lot longer than most of the public understands. People are trying to recover, immediately recover for a lot longer than people realize. So no, you won’t be there day one. Will you be there when you’re needed? Yes, yes.
Katie Vernoy 23:21
So that’s actually very reassuring. And I think that there are some folks who are thinking, I want to be ready when an emergency inevitably hits my neighborhood or hits my community, or I recognize that this is happening more and more, and I want to be deployed. I want to be part of the boots on the ground and so in less fraught situations, what does the process look like to volunteer with the Red Cross as a mental health provider?
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 23:49
So in a normal I’d like to join you would go to redcross.org, you submit an application, and it routes you to your local region. There are 49 regions. LA, for instance, is its own region. LA County is one region because it’s so large and complex, right? And then you’re you do. It’s a lot of online trailer watching videos and online trainings and things you kind of have to check off the box. It’s only about eight hours total, but it feels like a lot. For some people, feels like a lot, right? So you do background check, you’ll do license verification, you’ll do about eight hours total training, and then you’re good to go in your region and for national deployment, and the logistics of that look a little bit different region to region. So I couldn’t really give you exactly how that would work for everyone who could be listening, but that sets you up. We do have a number of people who’ve come through the system. They volunteer for some period of time, they go, they go for a little while, a couple disasters, or, you know, for a couple of years, and then they, you know, go and take that knowledge right back to their own system, to a different system, right, or where they’re where they’re working professionally. And I found, as I was going through and just kind of doing industry survey of people who do disaster work, how many threads come back at the end of the day to a Red Cross volunteer who created a training, who trained up their own staff, who trained up their own community, right? So there’s a lot you can take back to prepare your community as well.
Curt Widhalm 25:31
What does deployment actually look like for people who are coming from outside of the area? What, what should somebody expect as far as going how long? What kind of spaces are they staying in? What does that look like?
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 25:46
So I want to start that answer with a non answer, which is, there is not just deployment. There is local work. Red Cross responds to over 60,000 house fires a year where people have lost everything just the same way that they lost everything in the in the wildfires, in LA, obviously, the wildfires, the big wildfires take out whole communities, which adds complexity, but the individual recovery is the same for a single part, you know, single family that’s lost their home. So you can stay in your area, you can stay in your house, and you can help people in your community who are recovering from disasters. The local areas also cover smaller floods, things where multi family buildings have fires, and we move people into shelters after that, all those kinds of things you can do locally. And it’s the same exact mental health practice that you’re going to do at the local level as you’re going to do if you’re nationally deployed. If you want to go nationally, go to some of these bigger disasters that are outside your hometown, you typically sign up for a minimum of 10 days. Some people go as long as three weeks. And some people, very small number of people will stay on site for a long time, right, depending on their personal circumstances and interests at the time, but it’s typically a minimum of 10 days, and what that looks like is wildly different, disaster to disaster, or even moment to moment, or person to person. So, take Maui as an interesting example. You know, in Maui, the entire town of Lahaina burned down, right? And if you know Maui, there isn’t that much around Lahaina. There’s you have to go a little bit of a drive to get to the main part of the island, and then you have the larger hotels on the other side. So when people first responded to Maui, in the first couple of weeks, there was a group of people who were hiking a half a mile to stay at a Boy Scout retreat tent campground right, with no real walls and lots of bugs and a cot, right? There were other people that exact same time who were housed in very nice luxury hotels, because that’s all there was for housing. The whole town burned down, right? There wasn’t anything available. So what you should expect is, who knows what you’re going to get? Right? That’s what you should expect. We do in Red Cross have what we call hardship codes, which means this is going to say, these are the things you should you should expect to be present. So in the early stages of hurricane Helene, and particularly in North Carolina, there was no power. There was no running water, right? So if you needed those things, right? You know, we had a lot of people, you know, say, tea pack machines, right? You couldn’t go because there was no electricity there, right? And people make decisions based sometimes on those hardship codes, like, Okay, I can’t do that. I’m not ready to do that. Wait till later in the operation, when the power is back on. I can see the news, right? And then I’ll go when it’s the right time for me. So there is a element of personal discernment that you need to do to decide what’s what’s best for you, what kind of event, what stage of the event is the best time for you to go?
Katie Vernoy 29:12
When I watched that training with a MFT, I was struck by a couple of things. One is this kind of possibility that you would be on a cot or something, and that there’s really a an effort by Red Cross not to take kind of the cushy living quarters from the folks who are actually experiencing the disaster, which makes so much sense. I think the other thing that I’d love for you to speak into is that being able to stand and have be able to talk with folks in different ways that would be potentially physically taxing for some folks, and so if you could describe you know, you get there, maybe you’re on a cot. Maybe in a luxury hotel, like, what are the what are the next steps of what it looks like to deploy?
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 30:07
Well, and it goes back to describing what is, what does Red Cross do, right? So we are going to send people wherever the survivors are, right? And I had in Helene, you know, one person at a emergency supply distribution center, so people would drive in to pick up, you know, blankets and tents and clothes and things like that. And she was working there, and be like, how you how are you? Right? For the plane crash in national airport just this January, we were working with the families, and we’re in the Family Assistance Center, of course, but we were also in the plane hangers, where NTSB and all the other professionals were who were sorting through this awful debris and saying, how are you? How are you doing, right? How are your coworkers doing? A lot of them would be like, Well, I’m okay, but we’ve got all of these young people working in this section of the response. I’m real worried about those responders, right? So you’re going wherever the people are in, whatever circumstance, standing in whatever environment they’re standing in, right? So you have to kind of be ready for that. And that’s not to say that every single volunteer that goes out has can lift 50 pounds, right? Plenty of people who can’t do any kind of heavy work, but you need to be able to stand and walk around and get yourself around and take care of yourself. I think that’s one of the bigger components too, is that you don’t want to go there and become something that that the health services department has to to take care of. And so there’s a physical element to that. Now you can also support virtually, and from the comfort of your home, right, never leave. We have several responders who are home bound because of medical issues. They do virtual support.
Curt Widhalm 32:08
Where can people find out more about American Red Cross mental health services? How can they find trainings? How can they find other ways to support in all of this? So
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 32:21
I will own that right now, Red Cross is a bit gatekeeped in that you can’t easily access a training if you’re not brought in as a volunteer. And that process is, you go to redcross.org, you fill out the form. They do a background check to make sure that you are a safe person to bring around vulnerable people, and then you get into our pipeline, and you can take the trainings, and you’ll have full access to the online web library, which has, I mean, just hundreds of trainings, both in mental health things, but also other things for disasters, like, what does case work look like in a disaster? How do we support getting people to resources who are more vulnerable. You know, everything from that to how do you set up a cot, hundreds of trainings in that library that are, that are interesting. I think in the future, we’ll be able to offer some more things to the general public. And certainly, I will keep all the I will I will advertise broadly right when we get there, I think probably least a year from that. But we do want to be able to take that knowledge on the road, because a lot of times the Red Cross isn’t the organizations that doing the mental health support after especially a small disaster. We’re certainly not the only organization who’s going to do mental health after a large disaster, so we want to make sure that we can do everything we can to make sure communities can take care of themselves in every way possible.
Katie Vernoy 33:48
Who should volunteer? Who are you asking to go to is it American Red cross.org or redcross.org what’s the website?
Dr. Shannon Goodhue 33:57
redcross.org. Yeah. Okay. It if you are interested in the change of pace, are you interested in something very different? You have a little sense of adventure, national deployment really interesting. One of the things the volunteers talk about the most is the bond and the friendships that they make at deployment, the very kind of social experience to go and be in these difficult environments together, that is appealing to you. We have a number of recent retirees who aren’t professionally working and are bored or interested in applying their skills in different ways, and want the volunteer schedule of I’ll work when I want to right? So we have a number of people like that, so that’s who I hope if you’re interested in crisis support, if you’re interested in being there in those first moments where somebody is directly impacted, then this is for you.
Curt Widhalm 34:59
And we will include links to all of that and including ways to donate and support Red Cross as well in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. Follow us on our social media. We’ll continue to put stuff out as we gain more information throughout the years. Join our Facebook group, the Modern Therapists Group, to continue on with this conversation, and until next time, I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy and Dr. Shannon Goodhue.
… 35:24
(Advertisement Break)
Announcer 35:27
Thank you for listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. Learn more about who we are and what we do at mtsgpodcast.com. You can also join us on Facebook and Twitter, and please don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss any of our episodes.
SPEAK YOUR MIND