Five Principles in Context: We Have Been Blind to Ecological Principles and Politics.

Abstract

In our 2007 article, Hobfoll, Watson and colleagues advanced a theoretical overview of the empirical evidence supporting immediate and mid-term mass trauma intervention in our paper, ‘Five essential elements of immediate and mid-term mass trauma intervention’ (Hobfoll et al., 2007). Perhaps because the evidence of anything resembling clinical trials was nearly non-existent, the authors chose another direction of logic. Specifically, we identified five essential elements that studies had found critical in predicting favorable outcomes in situations of mass casualty ranging from war, to terrorist attack, to mass shootings, and disasters. There was strong support for interventions to promote (1) a sense of safety, (2) calming, (3) a sense of selfand community efficacy, (4) connectedness, and (5) hope as naturalistic studies found these to be tied to more positive outcomes including lower levels of PTSD and depression, lower levels of physical, post-traumtic distress, traumatic growth, and functional adjustment. Further, these associations were tied to better outcomes on the individual, familial, and community levels of analyses. The impact of the five principles, as they have become known, has been remarkable. At the date of this writing, the paper has been cited 1319 times, according to Google Scholar (6-21-21). Perhaps more to the point of its importance, the five principles were used as a framework during the COVID-19 pandemic by hundreds of websites, including government authorities, NGOs, and psychosocial support organizations around the world. These included, guiding managing the stress related to the COVID-19 pandemic on the national level by the National Center for PTSD (2020), the Indian Council of Medical Research for patients and families with COVID-19 (2021) and New Zealand Red Cross (2020), as exemplars; supporting the well-being of the school community (National Educational Psychological Services, 2020), supporting children and adolescents during the COVID-19 Pandemic (Brymer, 2020) returning to school (Moore, 2020; Oxfordshire Schools, 2021), support for medical staff (Nadler et al., 2020). Literally, thousands of websites were informed by and credited the five principles as foundational in their strategy to COVID-19. At this juncture, rather than reveling in the clear success and contribution of the five principles paper, it is time to step back and assess where we were less successful, and where we might more humbly admit we have