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Occasional national and international traumas and disasters may affect large numbers of people worldwide. Well-known incidents in the past decade include the death of Princess Diana, the tsunami in South-East Asia, Hurricane Katrina, the Pakistan-Kashmir earthquake, and the World Trade Center terror attack. In all these incidents, in addition to other, less publicized large-scale disasters, hundreds of millions people went through intense emotions of fear, panic, despair, depression, and anxiety. The Internet – through various channels of online communication – provided many of these people with an effective means of psychological relief. Research conducted on such mass traumas has documented the feasibility and effectiveness of Internet-assisted activities in helping people mentally survive the aftermath of such unusual circumstances. This chapter reviews these interesting research reports and identifies specific types and modalities characterizing the online provision of emotional relief. It is proposed to preemptively construct mass disaster-specific web portals that could be operated at times of need and provide numerous effective services. International organizations – such as the UN and its related agencies (e.g., UNICEF, UNESCO), NATO, the World Bank, the European Commission, Interpol, the Red Cross, and the World Health Organization – should consider the initiation and establishment of such institutionalized infrastructures to harness the Internet’s ability to meet a population’s psychological needs in the event of unpredicted mass-disaster incidents.
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