Psychosocial framework for understanding psychological distress among survivors of the November 26, 2008 Mumbai terror attack: beyond traumatic experiences and emergency medical care.

The field of "Public Health in Disasters and Complex Emergencies" is replete with either epidemiological studies or studies in the area of hospital preparedness and emergency care. The field is dominated by hospital-based or emergency phase-related literature, with very little attention on long-term health and mental health consequences. The social science, or the public mental health perspective, too, is largely missing. It is in this context that the case report of the November 26, 2008 Mumbai terror attack survivors is presented to bring forth the multi-dimensional and dynamic long-term impacts, and their consequences for psychological well-being, two years after the incident. Based on literature, the report formulates a theoretical framework through which the lived experiences of the survivors is analyzed and understood from a social science perspective. This report is an outcome of the ongoing work with the survivors over a period of two years. A mixed methodology was used. It quantitatively captures the experience of 231 families following the attack, and also uses a self-reporting questionnaire (SRQ), SRQ20, to understand the psychological distress. In-depth qualitative case studies constructed from the process records and in-depth interviews focus on lived experiences of the survivors and explain the patterns emerging from the quantitative analysis. This report outlines the basic profile of the survivors, the immediate consequences of the attack, the support received, psychological consequences, and the key factors contributing to psychological distress. Through analysis of the key factors and the processes emerging from the lived experiences that explain the progression of vulnerability to psychological distress, this report puts forth a psychosocial framework for understanding psychological distress among survivors of the November 26, 2008 Mumbai terror attack.

Measuring vulnerability to natural hazards: a macro framework.

The measurement of vulnerability--defined here as the asymmetric response of disaster occurrences to hazardous events--signifies a key step towards effective disaster risk reduction and the promotion of a culture of disaster resilience. One of the reasons for not being able to do the same in a wider context is related to conceptual, definitional, and operational issues. This paper presents an operationally feasible framework for conducting this task and measures revealed macro vulnerability as a function of disaster risk and hazard probability. The probabilities of hazard and its perceived disaster risk were obtained from past data and from probability distributions. In this paper, the corresponding analytical framework is constructed using the case study of floods in Assam, India. The proposed indicator will help policymakers to draw on available macro-level data to identify the regions that are vulnerable to disasters, where micro-level disaster vulnerability assessments could be performed in greater detail.

People's perceptions on COVID-19 vaccination: an analysis of twitter discourse from four countries.

More than six and half million people have died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic till Dec 2022. Vaccination is the most effective means to prevent mortality and infection attributed to COVID-19. Identifying public attitudes and perceptions on COVID-19 vaccination is essential to strengthening the vaccination programmes. This study aims to identify attitudes and perceptions of twitter users towards COVID-19 vaccinations in four different countries. A sentiment analysis of 663,377 tweets from October 2020 to September 2022 from four different countries (i.e., India, South Africa, UK, and Australia) was conducted. Text mining using roBERTA (Robustly Optimized Bert Pretraining approach) python library was used to identify the polarity of people's attitude as "negative", "positive" or "neutral" based on tweets. A sample of 2000 tweets (500 from each country) were thematically analysed to explore the people's perception concerning COVID-19 vaccines across the countries. The attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines varied by countries. Negative attitudes were observed to be highest in India (58.48%), followed by United Kingdom (33.22%), Australia (31.42%) and South Africa (28.88%). Positive attitudes towards vaccines were highest in the United Kingdom (21.09%). The qualitative analysis yielded eight themes namely (i) vaccine shortages, (ii) vaccine side-effects, (iii) distrust on COVID-19 vaccines, (iv) voices for vaccine equity, (v) awareness about vaccines, (vi) myth busters, (vii) vaccines work and (viii) vaccines are safe. The twitter discourse reflected the evolving situation of COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination strategies, lacunae and positives in the respective countries studied.

Disaster recovery and structural inequalities: A case study of community assertion for justice.

Formal interventions are rationalized to be irreplaceable, especially with marginalized communities that are presumed to lack capacity. It is event centric and differ considerably from the community's experience of disaster risk and recovery within the everyday context. Thus, community engagement with multiple formal institutions that often fail to address recovery needs of the most marginalized, is inevitable. These contradictions lead to varied forms of community assertion towards addressing structural inequalities and injustices. In this paper we explore these contradictions by drawing from the work of scholars who recognize the limits of procedural justice and push for distributive justice, especially by focusing on grassroots processes using the lens of the politics of neo-liberalism and ontology of possibilities. Using a multi-sited instrumental case study approach the paper explores community's lived experiences, factors contributing to the persistence of structural inequality and injustice, and the alternate conception of justice and their assertions, in the disaster recovery context. The two case studies - Vistapit Mukti Vahini and Thayillam, inform an alternate theoretical conception of disaster recovery embedded in structural inequalities and injustices through the following three perspectives: Firstly how disaster risk and recovery emerge from historical and everyday lived reality of marginalized communities, their social relations and resulting material conditions; Secondly how challenging everyday social relations, processes and injustices is central to the community's alternate conception and assertion for disaster recovery; and finally how community assertion and recovery relies on the mobilization of vulnerability, which could mean being exposed and agentic at the same time.