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Social support is a vital cushion to mitigate the impact of traumatic events.

We should be as focused on psychological social support systems as we are on technological support systems.

Don’t let the realities of today cloud your vision of tomorrow.

On May 4, 2007, at 9:54 p.m., an EF5 tornado over 1.7 miles wide with winds over 205 miles per hour hit Greensburg, Kansas. The small rural town with a population of about 1,300 was leveled. The tornado took about a dozen lives and destroyed 95 percent of the town, including homes, businesses, and government buildings. The sirens went off approximately 15 minutes before the tornado hit, but there was no mechanism to prevent the disaster. Put yourself in the shoes of the residents of Greensburg: What do you do when your plans and your way of life and everything you know is destroyed overnight? What do you do as an individual, a business, a government, or a community?

The importance of social support in the wake of such a traumatic event cannot be understated. The term "social support" refers to a broadly defined construct encompassing individuals’ perceptions of being loved and cared for. Social support is a vital cushion to mitigate the impact of traumatic events. Social support is associated with lower levels of post-traumatic stress disorder and typically contributes to faster and more robust recovery after exposure to trauma (Evans, 2012). We can do much as a society to mitigate the loss of life, and perhaps there is also more we can do to improve social support in the wake of natural disasters.

Comparing Apples to Apples

Greensburg wasn’t the first small town in Kansas to be devastated by a tornado. In 1955, there was an EF5........

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