Corent McDonald | Building back better must include building back the mind

In a recent national address, Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness laid out a compelling and necessary vision for rebuilding Jamaica in the wake of Hurricane Melissa. He outlined four forward-thinking framework foundational pillars - strategic spatial planning, infrastructure redundancy, regional development, and economic diversification - for which the Government deserves commendation.

Permit me to say, however, that there is a fifth pillar, one that is too often invisible in national-development plans yet whose absence quietly undermines everything else we build: the psychosocial well-being of our people.

We cannot lay concrete over trauma and call it resilience.

Not only did Hurricane Melissa destroy buildings, roads, and livelihoods, it shattered the sense of safety, belonging, and dignity of thousands of Jamaicans, particularly those in Black River and the surrounding communities of St Elizabeth. Many of these same communities were already carrying the weight of generational poverty, historical marginalisation, and the cumulative stress of repeated climate events long before Hurricane Melissa made landfall. For them, this hurricane was not a single crisis. It was one more unbearable chapter in a story that has never known adequate relief.

Research shows that communities in receipt of psychosocial support after disasters recover faster, rebuild more cohesively, and are more resistant to social breakdown, including crime, domestic violence, substance abuse, and mental illness, that so often follows in the wake of a catastrophe. Conversely, communities left to absorb psychological trauma without structured support tend to fragment, and no amount of physical infrastructure can hold together a community that is falling apart from within.

I am, therefore, calling on this Government, and specifically, on the Ministry of Health and Wellness, to ensure that the national rebuilding strategy includes a robust, properly resourced, and culturally grounded psychosocial care programme. This is entirely consistent with what the ministry is already advancing through its mental health and wellness agenda, and Hurricane Melissa has created both the urgency and the opportunity to accelerate that work.

First, psychosocial recovery must be embedded from the start, not added as an afterthought once the physical rebuilding is deemed complete. Psychosocial recovery is not a soft add-on. It is infrastructure.

Second, the programme must be community-led and culturally sensitive. Jamaican people respond to care that speaks their language, understands their history, and respects their dignity. We must move beyond clinical models alone and invest in community-health workers, trained counsellors, peer support networks, and faith-based partnerships that reach people where they are.

Third, it must address not only the acute trauma of Melissa but the deeper, layered wounds of history, including the legacies of displacement, economic exclusion, and systemic neglect that have left many of our communities psychologically vulnerable long before any hurricane arrived.

Fourth, it must be funded as a line item in the national redevelopment budget, with clear accountability, measurable outcomes, and legislative backing where necessary.

Fifth, it must be coordinated across ministries, including Health and Wellness, Education, Labour, and Local Government, so that psychosocial support is woven into schools, workplaces, housing developments, and community spaces as a matter of national policy.

Resilience is indeed incompatible with single points of failure as suggested by the prime minister. I would, however, add this: a nation whose people are emotionally broken, psychologically unsupported, and carrying unprocessed grief, is a nation with a single point of failure at its very core, and that core is its people.

Jamaicans are resilient -we have always been - but resilience is not the same as suffering in silence. True national resilience requires that we acknowledge the pain our people carry, meet them in that pain with professional, compassionate, and sustained care. We need to build systems that treat mental and emotional well-being not as a luxury but as a human right and a development imperative.

I urge the Government to ensure that when the history of Jamaica’s response to Hurricane Melissa is written, it will record not only the roads we rebuilt and the sea walls we erected but the people we restored.

Corent McDonald, PhD, is a process consultant with a focus on organisational/individual development and change as interactional process; sociocultural and contemporary/historical analysis of people and organisations; the effects of emotional-cognitive defensiveness as against transcendental openness and learning and; mapping the distribution of structural power in Jamaica. She is also an adjunct lecturer at The University of the West Indies. E-mail corentmac7@gmail.com.