About CECT
Vibrant Emotional Health and Disaster Psychiatry Outreach (DPO) joined forces in 2019 to create the Crisis Emotional Care Team. This merge allows Vibrant to access its 50-plus-year history of mental health service provision with the DPO service model to provide best practices in emotional and mental health support to organizations and individuals recovering from disasters, emergencies, and other crises.
The Crisis Emotional Care Team (CECT) provides just-in-time support and care for those in the acute as well as longer-term recovery phases of a natural or human-caused disaster or crises. Our team fosters individual and community resiliency by training emotional care providers to work collaboratively with those affected – to build capacity, self-efficacy, and the ability to apply standards of excellence and best practices.
We are a team of volunteer emotional care providers committed to effectively and intentionally alleviating and mitigating the emotional suffering that can arise in the wake of disaster or crises.
Program Purpose
Vibrant’s Crisis Emotional Care Team is here to help. We will provide a compassionate presence while delivering crisis intervention and emotional care to empower survivors to navigate, process, and work through the distress of a disaster. The CECT will also offer training to local providers in an effort to build their capacity to carry services through long-term recovery.
What is a Crisis?
While the definition is fairly broad, these are the types of crises that the CECT is prepared to respond to:
● Natural or human-caused disasters
● Other emergencies that cause major disruption of individual or community functioning
● Incidents of mass violence or community violence
● Death of a staff member or program participant
● Cluster suicides and school suicides
How to Join the CECT Cadre
The Crisis Emotional Care Team is always seeking members to join the cadre. If you have experience providing emotional or mental health care and would like to be a part of our cadre, please sign up below.
To learn more about being a member of the CECT cadre, click here to view our FAQ guide.
For inquiries, requests, or any other information, please contact the Crisis Emotional Care Team at [email protected].
CECT Services
The CECT is a cadre of mental health professionals with the knowledge and expertise to support organizations and individuals preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters and crises.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the CECT has provided behavioral health support, training, and psychoeducation to:
● Communities and organizations alongside individuals and families recovering from natural or human-caused disasters or experiencing the ongoing emotional impact of COVID-19
● Healthcare workers and hospital leadership
● Frontline responding government agencies and state disaster preparedness and response departments focused on leadership in crisis and disaster behavioral health
● Asylum seekers, refugees and unaccompanied minors, responders, and associated staffs
Our cadre of volunteer behavioral health providers respond by invitation from and in partnership with organizations and teams to ensure the longevity of the impact of our work.
We are poised to respond to any request for assistance as we understand that local community members are the lead first responders. We may, at times, initiate a connection to our contacts in every state across the nation and those with whom we work daily in New York City. Please feel free to inquire about any level of support you may need.
Support for Communities and Organizations
To prepare communities and non-profit organizations to respond in the wake of a natural or human-caused disaster, we provide disaster behavioral health preparedness training across the United States who may not typically be active in disasters but are then called into disasters when these incidents strike their communities.
We aim to offer:
● Highly interactive, in-person, or virtual training on an array of topics that will help prepare you for disasters and crises.
● Just-in-time training to guide you to respond and work through a disaster when it strikes.
● Access to our growing fundamentals of disaster behavioral health digital resource library.
Thought Leadership
The Model for Adaptive Response to Complex Cyclical Disasters is a collaborative blueprint designed to help survivors, community leaders, first responders, and others involved in disaster work to better understand how constant, overlapping disasters affect individuals and communities. To view and learn more about the blueprint, visit marccd.info
As part of our commitment to developing best practices in the disaster and behavioral health space, we host an annual conference. Please check vibrantdbhcon.org for information on our 2024 Disaster Behavioral Health Conference from October 1-3, 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee.
About the Team
Amy Carol Dominguez, MPA – Program Director, Crisis Emotional Care Team at Vibrant Emotional Health
Supervising Committee – the Vibrant Emotional Health Disaster + Crisis Response Committee
Co-Chair: Sander Koyfman, MD – Immediate Past Board President, Disaster Psychiatry Outreach (Vibrant Board Member)
Co-Chair: Grant Brenner, MD – Immediate Past Board Vice President, Disaster Psychiatry Outreach (Vibrant Board Member)
Saeed Aminzadeh – Decision Point Health
Christian Burgess – Director, Disaster Distress Helpline at Vibrant Emotional Health
Mahlet Endale, Ph.D. – Private Practice Psychologist, Crossroads Mental Wellness Services
Nathan Graber, MD – St. Peter’s Health Partner Medical Associates
Jason Helgerson – Helgerson Solutions
Craig Katz, MD – Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Medical Education, and System Design and Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Founder of Disaster Psychiatry Outreach
Patricia Lincourt – NYS Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services
David Marcozzi, Ph.D. – University of Maryland
Mona Masood, MD – Founding Director of the Physicians Support Line
April Naturale, Ph.D. – Vice President, Disaster Services, Vibrant Emotional Health
Linda Paradiso, DNP – New York City College of Technology, Doctor of Psychiatric Nursing Faculty at CUNY, and former Disaster Psychiatry Outreach Board Member
Bruce Schwartz, MD – Montefiore Health System (Vibrant Board Member)
Training Subcommittee
Mark Evces, Ph.D., ABPP – Founder of WorkHaven LLC Consulting Group
Lisa Furst, LMSW, MPH – Chief Program Officer at Vibrant Emotional Health
Craig Katz, MD – Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Medical Education, and System Design and Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Founder of Disaster Psychiatry Outreach
Shamaila Khan, Ph.D. – Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University
Sallie Lynch – Senior Program Development at Tuesday’s Children
April Naturale, Ph.D. – Vice President, Disaster Services, Vibrant Emotional Health
Linda Paradiso, DNP – New York City College of Technology, Doctor of Psychiatric Nursing Faculty at CUNY, and former Disaster Psychiatry Outreach Board Member
Rachelle Ramos, MD – Psychiatrist in New York and former Disaster Psychiatry Outreach Board Member