Call for Papers Hurricane Katrina (2005) devastated New Orleans thereby revealing inherent vulnerabilities that resided in the socio/political/ecological/technical infrastructure (system) of the city and the nation. The event highlighted the ‘...city’s fragile physical environment, aging infrastructure, and declining economic and social structure’ (Comfort, 2006:1). Comfort (2006:2) asks the qu...

In August 2006, a year after Hurricane Katrina, the first acute inpatient public psychiatric unit for adults was opened in New Orleans to serve patients referred from local emergency departments. This article describes the clinical and administrative experiences of providing inpatient care in post-Katrina New Orleans, including the increased demand for programs to treat patients with co-occurri...

Team Reach Out started as a student-initiated service-learning project with the goal of providing on-going assistance to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Four years after Hurricane Katrina, Team Reach Out refocused efforts to Cape Town, South Africa, where 4 senior nursing students and 1 science student integrated their leadership skills with the application of public health knowledge, compass...

A few weeks ago I was reflecting on the impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico when I received an e-mail asking me “to think and type some comments of my experiences post Katrina” as we were approaching the fifth anniversary of the worst natural or man-made disaster in the history of this country. It seems almost unreal to remember that event while evaluating another disaster, the worst ...

WE KNEW THERE was a storm coming. Its name was Katrina, and it was headed straight for Florida, which was unfortunate for those having just endured a recent hurricane. Katrina lulled the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, to sleep, and that night she swerved. In an unusual and ultimately devastating turn of events, the hurricane literally cut west and traversed the state of Florida to find itself ...

TOPIC Hurricane Katrina was a disaster that affected the lives of many people from the Gulf Coast area. The hurricane affected their emotional and physical health, and devastated their financial and material status. PURPOSE This article relates the lived experience of a Hurricane Katrina New Orleans evacuee who relocated to Texas permanently. CONCLUSION The people who resided in these commu...

This study estimates the effects of the post-Katrina school reforms on the operating expenditures of New Orleans’ publicly funded schools. We compare all the city’s publicly funded schools to a group of Louisiana school districts that had similar spending patterns before the New Orleans reforms shifted the city to a charter-driven system. We also show changes for both groups before and after th...

This article introduces the special section on child and adolescent mental health research in the context of Hurricane Katrina. We outline the purpose and intent of the special section and present an integrative perspective based on broad contextual theories of human development with which to think about the impact of disasters like Katrina. The perspective emphasizes multiple levels of influen...