A Computational Map of the Disaster Mental Health Research Landscape

Soheil Shapouri, Saber Soleymani

When disasters strike, they not only damage infrastructure, buildings, and the economy, but also affect the mental health of affected populations. Research on the mental health effects of disasters has expanded rapidly and has become an important, well-funded area of psychology, public health, and related social sciences. However, the overall structure of this research landscape has not been systematically characterized. Using large language models, we conducted a review of all articles related to terms 'disaster' and 'mental health' indexed in PubMed. 7,859 articles' metadata were retrieved using the NCBI API, and then Claude Sonnet was used to extract structured variables from the abstracts. The results indicated that earthquakes and epidemics were the most commonly studied disasters while many other disasters such as heat and cold waves have received less attention. PTSD, depression, and anxiety were well investigated but many other mental health issues (e.g., aggression, suicide) are relatively ignored. Despite enjoying relatively large sample sizes (median = 452, IQR = 142 - 1,568), the field rarely utilizes machine learning algorithms. Hypothesis significance testing,…