Effects Of Coping On Mental Health For Rescuers In 5.12 Earthquake In Hanzhong District

In recent years, acute critical incidents come one after another, causing great adversity to people in disasters. Nevertheless, according to related studies, helpers are in high risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the incidence of them is between that of general people and ones'in disasters. However, there are few studies elucidating the psychological status and proper coping for rescuers in the second line, who committed missions like rebuilding houses and so on. On the other hand, studies on the relation between coping and psychological health, especially those about people after traumatic events, often discuss the influence of single coping behavior, couldn't reflect the actual situation, because people in stress often incorporate all kinds of coping behaviors. As a result, the conclusion may be misleading. Additionally, conventional studies on coping often employ mature-immature, negative-positive, or good-bad classification for discussing. But coping should be recognize as adaptive, which are specific for situations, and there is no absolutely good or bad coping behavior. So studies depending on those classification had limited significance on practice. This study explored the psychological health of rescuers in the second line for 5.12 earthquake, discussed the influence of different kinds of coping on their psychological health, based on classification of concrete coping behaviors, and provide theoretical lines for the psychological education and helping.Conclusions below were found in this study:(1) The psychological health of the sample studied were better than general Chinese army, and attention should be paid to limited persons with poorer mental health. Scores of all the factors, excluding hostility and somatization, were all lower than norms of Chinese army.(2) The psychological health of the rescuers were similar with those who were not. And compared with non-rescuers, only scores of hostility were significantly higher for the rescuers, and differences for scores of other factors were not significant.(3) Compared with norms of Chinese army, rescuers employed more mature coping behavior, less immature and compounding coping behaviors.(4) Significant correlations were found between coping styles and all the factors of SCL-90, in which the correlations of solving problem and seeking help were negative, and correlations of self-blame, hallucinates, retreating and reasoning were positive.(5) Coping behaviors of rescuers could be classified into four classes, avoiding group, compounding group, weak coping group, toward coping group. And the psychological health were worse for compounding group and avoiding group, better for weak coping group and toward coping group.(6) Only a few people had serious psychological problems for rescuers who were not first-line rescuers. As a result, less counseling resources should be allocated to these people, and attention should only be paid to limited ones. According to the findings of this study, reasonable cognition and education of proper coping can promote their health further.