The Conversation

Collective trauma is real, and could hamper Australian communities' bushfire recovery

13-02-2020 Author: Erin Smith, Associate Professor in Disaster and Emergency Response, School of Medical and Health Sciences, Edith Cowan University

creMost of us are probably familiar with the concept of psychological trauma, the impact on an individual’s psyche caused by an extremely distressing event.

But there’s another kind of trauma. A collective disturbance that occurs within a group of people when their world is suddenly upended.

Consider the Buffalo Creek flood of 1972, in...

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