Agile working and the impact on well-being and mental health: How to support digital resilience Research Communities by Springer Nature

One of the most important ways to foster resilience is to promote healthy family and community environments that allow the individual’s natural protective systems to develop and operate effectively. In order to improve the odds for healthy FEMA Mental Health Technology Resources development and resilience, it may be necessary to provide a variety of resources to families, schools and communities. While it is useful for researchers to identify general principles related to resilience, it is also important to recognize that successful determinants may vary from one person to the next based on multiple factors such as personality, specific challenges, resources available, and environmental context. Taking the perspective of any parent whose children are at risk, I am here emphasizing that interventions that take only a piecemeal or short-term action to boost physical and mental health do not necessarily resonate with my cultural goals. I think that interventions targeted at readiness for jobs and education, targeted at alleviating violence and human insecurity, or targeted at social justice to enhance fairness in access to resources are among the most effective ways to enhance resilience.

• Community capacity-building identifies and strengthens existing assets and skill sets within a community, establishing new collaborations to address emerging issues, and leveraging existing resources in a sustainable manner .
• This same partnership worked with the local school district to provide daily meals to community members at the community center.
• A focus on these individual elements may be more productive than attempting to define and study community resilience as a distinct concept.
• Most sources of stress originate from the self, others, and environmental threat.

Resilient communities foster individual resilience, health, and performance.

Resilience-building initiatives emphasise a whole-of-society approach where resilience is built ‘one community at a time’ . Formal ‘health communicators’, such as government agencies and public service organisations and healthcare staff, have responsibilities to provide targeted and timely information to the public, to promote public health, enhance preparedness and guide appropriate responses during crises 32, 50. This is thought to contribute to the differential burden of acute emergencies on the resilience of disadvantaged communities . Authors have also described the chronic ‘weathering’ effects that some communities experience, where there is resilience erosion over time .

The Role of Community Resilience in Disaster Risk Reduction

The specific elements of the definition would be operationalized differently depending upon the level of analysis, be it an individual, grass-roots group, larger human community, or entire ecology, but our basic definition aims to apply across levels. We then discuss community resilience as a strategy for promoting effective disaster readiness and response. After all, postdisaster community health depends in part on the effectiveness of organizational responses, and ultimately the purpose of disaster management is to ensure the safety and well-being of the public. The other path has been relatively more concerned with community resilience as it describes effective organizational behavior and disaster management. Still, much of what is known or proposed here about community resilience was gleaned from or applies equally well to other types of collective stressors and adversities. Community adaptation is manifest in population wellness, defined as high and non-disparate levels of mental and behavioral health, functioning, and quality of life.

The findings have implications for the development of treatment for not only symptoms of trauma but also in other contexts and symptoms and fostering resilience. Challenges are risks, stressors, or any adversity which threatens the well-being of a person or system. Hence, resilience cannot be measured separate from the context (as a characterological trait) (Rutter, 2012). Moreover, from this point of view, resilience is not an active attribute but has to be understood based on the context. Norman Garmezy (1974), a pioneer of resilience research hypothesized resilience as a process and not as a fixed attribute. Scales like Resilience Scale for Adolescents (Hjemdal et al., 2006) and Behavioral Assessment System for Children, 2nd Edition (Reynolds & Kamphaus, 2004), are used to measure resilience as a dynamic process.

In areas of deprivation, community identification has been shown to predict residents’ well‐being via feelings of collective efficacy (McNamara et al., 2013). Meanwhile, neighbour proximity affords opportunities for shared interests, common fate and interactions, thus potentially resulting in meaningful social bonds (Easterbrook & Vignoles, 2015). Around one third of UK survey respondents report experiencing negative emotional consequences of pandemic‐related disconnection, and this is particularly anxiety‐inducing for those with challenging living circumstances, lack of support networks and existing conditions (L. Z. Li & Wang, 2020). The impact of the pandemic on social life is likely to exacerbate these effects.

Cicchetti et al. (2007) conducted a multilevel study of adrenal steroid hormones cortisol and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) in maltreated and non-maltreated children. The brain changes during the developing years influence the vulnerability to future psychopathology by affecting the ability for moderating negative emotions and consequently impact an individual’s resilience capacity (Cicchetti & Curtis, 2006). As an outcome, resilience garnered partial support, and the trait model had minimal or least support of the three. A study by Happer et al. (2017) compared the three approaches of resilience mentioned above in youth receiving trauma-specific cognitive–behavioral therapy. The idea that resilience can increase as a dynamic process makes this approach relevant to developing interventions and treatments (Padesky & Mooney, 2012). Competence can be enhanced through training and support ultimately increasing resilience.

One option is to abandon the search for a single, precise definition of community resilience. At present, definitions within this field tend to either focus on specific aspects of the concept that may lead to overconfidence in the resilience of a given community that is deficient in elements that were not considered, or else tend towards all-encompassing definitions that may be too complex to apply at the local level. This term was conceptually different to mental health, as the latter dealt with well-being while the former dealt with attitudes towards uncertainty. Additionally, bolstering psychological wellness through public health communication campaigns was another example of ways to bolster resilience22.