Australians affected by worst ever bushfires suffer from mental health issues: study

A quarter of people impacted by Victoria's deadly 2009 Black Saturday bushfires are suffering from serious mental health issues, a report has found.

The fires left 173 people killed and 414 others injured as up to 400 individual fires burned over one million acres of Victorian land, making it the most devastating bushfire in Australia's history.

Almost eight years since the fire ravaged the state, a survey by Beyond Bushfires, carried out over six years, found that 26 per cent of people in the worst affected areas showed signs of mental health problems "beyond levels likely to be manageable and may require professional support."

Lisa Gibbs, lead researcher of the study and director of the Jack Brockhoff Child Health and Wellbeing Program at the University of Melbourne, said it was important to take a long-term approach to disaster recovery.

"I think what we've done is perhaps underestimated the ongoing disruptions that occur after a disaster," Gibbs told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Tuesday.

"Everyone has a natural level of resilience, but it gets undermined when there's ongoing demands.

"So you might cope with the original trauma event, but then there's a change of accommodation, impact on relationships, change of income -- and that starts to bring people down."

The report found that Black Saturday had a particularly profound impact on children but Gibbs said they were sometimes overlooked.

"Often people didn't think about services for very young children because they kind of hoped that they'd forget about it," she said.

"But what we found was that those impacts were apparent."

Jason Gaffee, a resident of one of the hardest hit communities in Kinglake and a police officer, said he helped his wife and two young sons deal with the trauma.

"I guess the biggest thing for me in the aftermath was the breakdown of the community and some of those social infrastructures that were there to help children and families cope," Gaffee said.

"When you lose a school or a preschool centre, or, for example, a cricket club stops functioning as effectively as it has been, that breakdown of those social structures does impact long-term." Endit