Bibliographic record
Abstract
Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Clinical & ResearchFull AccessMy Journey Into Disaster Psychiatry: Join MeFrank G. Sommers, M.D., F.R.C.P.C.Frank G. SommersSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., F.R.C.P.C.Published Online:25 Jul 2023https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2023.08.7.32AbstractLike many psychiatrists, the author got involved with disaster-response work because of personal experiences. This article is part of a series by APA’s Committee on Psychiatric Dimensions of Disaster.iStock/Getty Images/Filippo CarlotMany of you reading this have familiarity and indeed personal experience with disasters, such as tornadoes, floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and mass shootings. My life’s overwhelming disaster has been one that affects the lives of millions: war. Understanding disasters more broadly helps psychiatrists to provide care for those impacted by war.My first encounter with disasters was being born in Budapest into the manmade carnage and destruction of World War II. An additional burden exposing our family to summary execution by murderous roving Nazi Arrow Cross gangs of thugs was that we belonged to the Jewish faith. After liberation from our hiding place by the Soviet Red Army fighting the retreating German Army, a Stalinist communist dictatorship held Hungary in its tyrannical iron grip. Growing up without freedom in a totalitarian police state added to the fear imposed by the always-threatening Cold War.My liberation occurred upon escape to the freedom of neighboring Austria on December 15, 1956. It was past midnight, when cold and very tired after a forced 20 km march with my brother and parents, we crossed the temporarily open Iron Curtain into free Austria. But I felt happy: reborn at age 13. Our escape followed the brutal defeat of the popular Hungarian uprising by Soviet soldiers whose commanders lied that they were again fighting the resurgence of Nazism. How similar to the current Russian carnage inflicted on Ukraine!Refugee life in Canada followed with its challenges, including learning a new language, resuming schooling, and of course, working part-time jobs, always. But nothing compared with hiding during WWII and living under a communist dictatorship, afraid for our lives.I share these formative experiences of my life to illuminate the path that propelled me into medicine and then psychiatry with a strong focus on community and primary prevention, including school consulting and a military deployment in Afghanistan.Further, my experience also helps to explain my interest and motivation to be helpful to people impacted by disasters. As psychiatrists, we are uniquely positioned to apply our knowledge and skills to help communities recover from disasters and enhance their resilience.The APA Committee on Psychiatric Dimensions of Disaster provides a welcoming, expert home for this work. Many helpful resources for patients may be accessed on the APA webpage. The Disaster Psychiatry Section of the Canadian Psychiatric Association and the University of Toronto’s Disaster Psychiatry Canada website offer useful information for psychiatrists, including full recordings of our previous five CME training programs.Information about our sixth annual CME course on June 9 may.I’d like to close this brief introductory note by encouraging all colleagues in psychiatry, regardless of clinical or subspecialty interest, to consider yourself a “disaster psychiatrist” ready, willing, and able, with some self-directed training, to help out when disaster strikes your community. ■ResourcesCoping After DisasterThe Disaster Psychiatry CanadaFrank G. Sommers, M.D., F.R.C.P.C., is the founding chair of the Section of Disaster Psychiatry of the Canadian Psychiatric Association and Disaster Psychiatry Canada and is a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He is also a corresponding member of APA’s Committee on the Psychiatric Dimensions of Disaster. ISSUES NewArchived
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.025 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".