MCC Day 41 – Roundtable on Needs of Family and Community After a Mass Casualty Incident

After a week of dramatic testimony and revelations which made national news, the MCC is looking to be much quieter as we end the month of June. Today, there was a seven-person roundtable discussion on the mental health needs of families and communities after a mass casualty incident. On Thursday, there will be a similar discussion, focused on the needs of first responders after a mass casualty. Part of the mandate for the Commission is to examine issues around supports offered to the families of victims, affected citizens, police personnel, and the community. That means that there is a requirement to try to understand what supports might have been seen to be effective in other cases, and to compare them to what has happened in Nova Scotia following the shootings. Like with other areas that are to be studied, the MCC has taken that requirement and adopted a very (and perhaps overly) thorough approach. There was no discussion of the specific events of the mass casualty of April 18-19, 2020 in Nova Scotia. Instead, the discussion (which lasted nearly five hours) was a broadly based one that brought in other examples of tragedies in other places, such as Norway, the 9/11 attacks in New York, and the Swiss Air crash of the coast of Nova Scotia. The discussion was lead by Dr. Emma Cunliffe, who is the Research and Policy Director for the MCC. There were seven panelists (or, rather, roundtable participants) for the discussion. They were Grete Dyb from the University of Oslo, Levant Alten from Victim Support Europe, Mary Fetchet from Voices Centre for Resilience (a 9/11 support group), Great Village resident and former Norther Zone Grief Coordinator Serena Lewis, Megan McElheran from Wayfound Mental Health Group, Terry Mitchell from Wilfred Laurier University, and University of New York Associate Professor Jaclyn Schildkraut. The introduction portion of the discussion took half an hour to complete.