Individual and Community Responses to Trauma and Disaster: the Structure of Human Chaos

Ed Robert J Ursano, Brian G McCaughey, Carol S Fullerton Cambridge University Press, £60, pp 422 ISBN 0 521 41633 7

Disasters are not the greatest threat to health in countries prone do disasters, where travellers are much more likely to meet death and injury while driving along the roads than by being trapped in an earthquake or swept away in a flood, for example. But the attention lavished on disasters by the media is not misplaced, as the reverberations of their impact on long term health and economic development can be profound and far outweigh the stark casualty figures.

Psychosocial processes obviously have an important influence on the outcome in a disaster, and we …