Mental Health in Local Public Employees Affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake

The Great East Japan Earthquake was a complex disaster with a variety of destructive effects, including tsunami damage and damage due to the nuclear power plant accident. Local public employees who work for disaster-struck municipalities, while themselves disaster victims, are engaged in unimaginably difficult work including disaster relief and recovery. This study presents the outcomes of a two-stage panel survey on mental health conducted once in 2015 and once in 2016. The subjects were 672 local public employees in one disaster group that suffered tsunami damage and another disaster group that suffered damage from the nuclear disaster. Results showed the high-risk rate on the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) was 11.9% for the tsunami-disaster group and 31.4% for the nuclear- accident group at Time 1. At Time 2, it was 8.9% for the tsunami-disaster group and 27.2% for the nuclear-accident group. From Time 1 to Time 2, the high-risk rate significantly decreased in both groups, but the percentage of high-risk persons remained elevated in the nuclear- accident group. In addition, factors predicting high risk for mental health issues by group were examined by logistic regression analysis. As a result, it was shown that the risk of traumatic stress and psychiatric disorders was increased by the occurrence of burnout as a result of high stress due to work experience after the disaster. Based on these results, future issues concerning stress care for local disaster public employees were discussed