A Computational Map of the Disaster Mental Health Research Landscape
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, reviews, qualitative methods, and structural equation modeling are respectively most common methods while agent-based modeling, machine learning, casual inference, and NLP each appear in less than 1% of articles. Studies are limited to a small number of countries, particularly the United States, Japan, and China, while many disaster-prone regions remain substantially underrepresented. This LLM-assisted computational map provides a broad overview of the disaster mental health literature while highlighting important methodological gaps, with particular emphasis on the underutilization of computational methods that could help advance the field.
