Overton Mental Health Responder Heads East

Overton County Emergency Medical Service’s Michael Wilson, a 30-year veteran of emergency services, arrived in East Tennessee Tuesday night to help residents deal with the mental health aspects of this week’s flooding.

Wilson deployed as part of the Tennessee Disaster Mental Health Strike Team. Executive Member Melissa Taylor said people need to have a safe place to talk through what they have seen or risk developing conditions like anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder.

“This disaster has affected our entire region in this end of the state,” Taylor said. “So being able to comprehend the loss of life, loss of family members, and just the pure destructive force of having a hurricane cause so much damage in Tennessee.”

Taylor said the long-term impacts of trauma like this vary greatly depending on the quality of a person’s coping mechanisms and support systems. Taylor said early intervention leads to better outcomes when dealing with mental health issues.

“It’s the same with your physical health,” Taylor said. “You know, if you have high blood pressure and you know it and you don’t treat it for, you know, five years down the line, now you’ve not only got high blood pressure but you’ve got all the complications that and it’s going to be harder to treat.”

Taylor said catastrophes like these affect the mental health of first responders, local citizens, and even unaffected communities in the surrounding region. Taylor said people recovering from disasters may also try to mask their symptoms or self-medicate with alcohol or other substances.

“Post-traumatic stress can be triggered days, weeks, years later,” Taylor said. “So we have to teach them to look for those signs and symptoms for those triggers that may bring back those signs and symptoms and how do you deal with that when that happens.”

Taylor said they were deployed by the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency to bring team members in from across the state to help address the disaster.

“This team is a specially, highly trained team that is trained in critical incident stress management, response, debriefing, defusing, mental health first aid, psychological triage, and suicide intervention,” Taylor said. “So we are just like a first line, boots on the ground team that supports the first responders and the community as this disaster is unfolding.”

Taylor said they will return in the future to do debriefings and other interventions with first responders to help them process what they have seen.