Free Mental Health Resources for Ukraine Response

The mental health of both individuals impacted by a humanitarian crisis and the people who are working to provide aid and support is critical. As the war in Ukraine continues, DisasterReady, in collaboration with The KonTerra Group, has developed a series of free videos on mental health topics to support refugees, internally displaced people, host families, humanitarians, and at-risk communities in Ukraine and neighboring countries.

With more than 12 million Ukrainians having fled their homes since Russia’s invasion, providing mental health and psychosocial support has become a critical part of the relief effort. We are proud to make mental health videos available on DisasterReady’s YouTube Channel in English, Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian on the following topics: 

• Coping with Grief and Loss

• Maintaining Wellbeing during Displacement

• Understanding and Coping with Vicarious Trauma

• 10 Tips for Supporting Staff after Traumatic Events

• What is Counseling and How it Can Help Me?

• Ways to Stay Calm in an Emergency  

With the creation of these new mental health videos, DisasterReady seeks to provide support to all people in the 'helping' professions as well as to humanitarians, host families, and refugees.

We are releasing these videos at a critical moment of need, as a sizable percentage of the displaced population is experiencing some form of negative psychological impact. Across Eastern Europe, the need for mental health services is overwhelming the local healthcare infrastructure. Many local organizations are struggling to find support resources in Ukrainian. I would appreciate it if you could share these free mental health videos with your organization and anyone in your network who could benefit from them.

In addition to these videos, we created the ability for humanitarian and development workers with Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian as their first language to easily create a free account at DisasterReady.org to access online courses and videos created in those languages. We have released the first set of courses in those languages and will be adding 16 more resources in the coming weeks. We will provide updates on these free learning resources on this blog as well as the DisasterReady LinkedIn and Facebook pages.