Preparing for disasters: Understanding mental health effects of emergency situations through the requirements imposed to support systems

Purpose: Disasters pose a formidable challenge for mental health support services in terms of resources and timely response. This study evaluates the effects of different types of events on Mexico City population during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, under the assumption that high-resolution time-scale data analysis performed onICT-based and telehealth systems can contribute to understand psychological needs, and toidentifying events with the potential to trigger outburst in support demands, estimate their time of occurrence and the characteristics of calls for service. Methods: The study evaluated the effects of public announcements of quarantine measures, mental health press conferences, festivities during 2020, and earthquakes with public early warnings between 2020 and 2023 reported through national public institutions databases, the “Screening tool for mental health problems” and the “lifeline service”, comprising 138,471 interactions. The analysis uses qualitative and quantitative methods, including principal component analysis, correlations, and one-way ANOVA. Results: The study successfully identified patterns in responses associated with acute stress, depression, and anxiety, as well as possible times of maximum demand associated with different types of events. Complex scenarios with multiple threats pose a high risk to support systems, producing short-term but significant outbursts in demand, with increases as high as 2,651% on a single day. Novelty: The research is novel in its time scope analysis and event-wise approach, providing valuable insights for emergency planning and resource allocation. Additionally, the study proposes evaluation criteria for detecting potential system overloads in telehealth services to enable early countermeasures.