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Psychological first aid and mental health first aid can assist anyone experiencing difficulties, including post-disaster populations. Its effectiveness has been demonstrated around the world, such as in Bangladesh, with plenty of opportunities for continuing and improving this work. Two recent scientific reviews offer summaries of and directions for psychological first aid in disasters.

The journal Social Work in Mental Health published a five-author collaboration among researchers in Thailand, Sweden, and Bangladesh. The authors sought and analysed publications on psychological first aid in disasters for social work.

Their search to find these publications used a single academic database and a highly focused set of keywords. For instance, they used “Psychological First Aid” and “PFA,” but do not mention “Mental Health First Aid” and “MHFA.” These categories have overlaps as well as differences. The search’s time frame started in 2000, with the justification that modern psychological first aid emerged around then, and ran to 2025.

The authors imposed no language restrictions, but keywords are listed only in English. The search resulted in 276 publications for analysis.

Their analysis identifies spikes in publication numbers after three major disasters: Haiti’s 2010 earthquake disaster, Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which ran from 2020 to 2023. No explanation is offered for why many other major disasters did not lead to similar increases in publication........

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