Hazard-Related Displacement: Psychological, Social, and Functional Impacts of Essential Service Disruption

A cross-sectional study analyzed adults who reported hazard-related displacement within the past year (N = 5527) from the U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey. A Loss of Essential Services (LES) index combined self-reported disruption to food, drinking water, electricity, and sanitation during the month after displacement; respondents were classified as Minimal, Moderate, High, or Extreme LES. Cross-tabulations compared demographic, social, psychological, and functional measures across LES categories, and a person-weighted multinomial logistic regression, with Extreme LES as the reference outcome category, estimated adjusted associations describing the profile of each LES category. In unadjusted comparisons, greater LES was associated with more frequent depressive symptoms, anxiety, worry, loss of interest, loneliness, and functional difficulty, along with lower perceived support and less frequent in-person contact. In adjusted analyses, LES category was associated with gender at birth, household income, race/ethnicity, children in the household, social support, in-person contact, functional limitation domains, and PHQ-4 item responses; loneliness was not independently associated. Findings are interpreted through Pressure and Release, Conservation of Resources, and Capability Approach frameworks. LES may help characterize displaced adults reporting multiple post-disaster needs; because the design is cross-sectional and disaster exposure was self-reported and not independently verified, these findings should be regarded as descriptive and hypothesis-generating rather than causal.