Topic: Disaster Preparedness for Persons with Mental Disabilities Project by Bethels House, By Satoko, Akiyama and Shoko, Katogi, Member-staff of Bethel's House.

Bethels House is a self-help group for users and survivors of psychiatry in Urakawa, Hokkaido, northern part of Japan.

Active participants of Bethel’s house are more than 100 persons with schizophrenia, depression, addiction of alcoholic and/or drug. Urakawa has been suffered from 11th strong earthquakes during 60 years. In 2003, a lot of Bethel's members did not escape to safty place,but stayed at their group home with being loss what to do. It is said that people with disabilities must be more dificult to survive from disasters, especially for the people with mental disabilities. Bethel’s House has been struggled for disaster preparation in cooperation with National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disability (NRCD) and a town administration since 2003. Based on the Japanese gorvament’s official data, we drafted the scenario of the refuge evacuation on the goal of “ “Reaching to the 10 meter high withinwith four minutes after the quake. We conducted evacuation trainings from our 3 vocational aid joint house and 7 group homes with the each refuge evacuation manuals which we made by DAISY. We conduct these project on the stance that it is ok to do the evacuation drill even though we still have some questions. Through this projects, many members understand how escape to the temporary evacuation places and acutually go to there when the strong earthquake happens. This winter, members have conducted the evacuation drill by themselves. This report will present about the preparedness disaster project by the people with mental disabilities in Japan.