A crisis is defined as an event that outdoes resources of the client or his coping skills developing emotional upheaval, behavioral difficulties as well as a cognitive distortion. Crises vary for each individual. What may appear to be a crisis to one person may not be a crisis to someone else but this does not mean that it is not a crisis to another person’s life. Crisis intervention strategies play a significant role in eliminating crises. The main goal of crisis intervention strategies is providing psychological resolution of the immediate crisis of a person and further restoring a person to a level of functioning that existed before the crisis period.
Crisis situations
Crises may result in different situations. Retirement, natural disasters, and death are some of the situations that can cause crises. A retirement crisis may entail a person with a family retiring from his or her job without satisfying his or her goals. This particular situation is regarded as a crisis because an individual may find difficulties coping well with his or her as a result of failure to provide for his or her family. This crisis is categorized as an existential crisis because it is connected to the wide concept of the attainment and purpose of a person. The retirement crisis is associated with situations of belief or regret that his or her life has passed by without fulfilling his or her goals.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Apart from the retirement crisis, death is another crisis that can happen to a person. For instance, a wife whose husband has died of cancer may begin threatening to shoot the doctor. This demonstrates a crisis because the person is not coping well with the situation. Death crisis is grouped under a developmental crisis group because the death of a loved one is a kind of transformation in the life of a person which requires a person to take time and process the change ( Wang & Gupta, 2020 ). Finally, natural disasters such as earthquakes, drought, floods, and hurricanes are also shared examples of crises. These kinds of strategies result when natural disasters surpass a person, a small or a quantifiable group of people. Natural disaster crisis may influence almost every member of the community in places they occur. Natural disaster crises are categorized under the Eco-systemic crisis because their effectiveness may entail the loss of loved ones, a situation where numerous individuals may find it challenging to cope up with.
As much as death, retirement, and natural disasters are different types of crises, they share a characteristic of danger and opportunity. These crises are dangerous because they surpass the ability of the person to severe pathology that includes suicide, homicide among others. However, these crises can be the basis for an opportunity for a person to seek assistance because of the pain they induce. More so, these crises require intervention to assist people to cope up with their lives.
Crisis intervention strategies
Numerous crisis intervention strategies can be used to help people with trauma. One of the crisis intervention strategies that can be used to help people with trauma is creating awareness and relationship building. In creating awareness, the counselor promotes an awareness of the feelings that underlie the behavior of the patient. The main purpose of creating awareness is to make the client feel understood, minimize the emotional arousal through venting, and reestablish some cognitive control level on the client’s part. This strategy can be attained through sharing and persistent communication of caring, safety, respect, and support. Relationship building is a significant component in the crisis intervention process because it assists both the client and the counselor to develop a bond and make psychological contact.
On the other hand, the counselor must establish a clear comprehension of the event that caused the crisis and the meaning of those events to the client. Besides, the client must feel the support that develops from being understood. Therefore, creating awareness and relationship building strategy involves active listening and showing significant conditions of positive regard, empathy, concreteness, and genuineness on which the crisis intervention is built. Calmness, confidence, and hopeful expectations of the counselor can facilitate a crisis interview. This simply implies that the client needs a role model that is not overwhelmed by the circumstances at hand.
Apart from creating awareness about the crisis, assuring safety is another crisis intervention strategy. It is significant for the counselor to assure safety to the client to cope with homicidal ideation, suicidal attempts, and actual attacks on oneself or fear of hurting someone else. If the client is assured of his or her safety, he or she will easily express his or her emotions which are significant for therapeutic purposes. After the client has expressed himself, it is the work of the counselor to judge the risk according to the answers to the questions asked and take prudent steps to help the client ( Séguin & Chawky, 2017 ). The counselor may decide to involve the family, hospitalize the client, and safeguard any intended victims. Counselors ought to seek assistance from their colleagues to assist them during intervention because dealing with a client in a crisis is the most disturbing and intellectually demanding situations a counselor can confront. In circumstances where the client is experiencing symptoms of stress that are abundantly acute to disrupt normal patterns of sleeping, working, and eating, psychiatric evaluation consideration ought to be given to prescribing suitable medications for psychotic, anxiety, and depression symptoms.
Additionally, conducting an assessment is another crisis intervention strategy that can be used to assist people with trauma. In this strategy, the crisis intervention counselor ought to safeguard the information of the client about the event that precipitated the crisis. The counselor must be aware of what the events mean to the client, the support system of the client, and his or her functioning before the crisis. According to James and Gilliland (2012), the secured information will assist the counselor to decide if the effects of the events may be reversed or moderated or whether the coping skills of the client can be mobilized to meet the challenges facing the client, determine somebody to help the client and what the counselor needs to do. During this process of assessment, the counselor observes the physical appearance of the client, mood, behavior, attention span, and speech pattern. The cues mentioned above show the extent to which the client can preoccupy the crisis. The purpose of conducting this particular assessment is to determine how clients manage difficult situations and the skills available to them. The particular strength assessment provides a guide as to what type of actions the client use to mobilize with the support and the encouragement of the counselor.
Another crisis intervention strategy that can be used to help people with trauma is providing support. Providing support involves naturalizing the responses of the client to what they have been experiencing. In this strategy, it is important to examine the support system of the client to find out who in the environment of the client cares about what happens to him or her and has an opinion that favors his or her worth. When the self-esteem of clients is low, it is significant to remind them to be attentive and further provide comfort for them. In giving support, the counselor assures the client that he or she cares for him or her. When the client has no other support individuals in their lives, plans ought to be developed so that emergency contacts can be made with the counselor individually in off-hours. This is particularly significant if suicidal ideation is evident but there is less evidence to consider hospitalization.
In addition to giving support, assisting the client with action plans strategy also plays a significant role in helping people with trauma. This type of strategy is probably different from other forms of treatment. In this strategy, the counselor encourages the client to select one or more actions he or she can accomplish. After encouraging the client to select an action, the counselor will assist the client to identify substantial positive actions that can assist the client to regain control of his life. However, the best plans are those that are owned by the client but the counselor has to give particular direction as to what ought to be tried as a partial solution. The actions that can be done by the counselor include referring the client to other sources of material help and providing support such as clothing, legal advice, and food. Referring the patient to other external services will help them in fixing particular issues in the life of these people. This is typically achieved through case management in the long-term but the short-term; they can be done through in-person crisis workers or telephone.
Implementing order is another strategy that can be used to assist people with trauma. It assists clients to divide their problem into manageable segments and decide which segment is the most important. Dealing with the most important issue helps clients to get a sense of control and start taking advantage of the internal coping strategies. Furthermore, the counselor should arrange a follow-up meeting with the client. The follow-up meeting ought to be done at a specified place and time to check on the progress of the client towards crisis resolution. If the client has not started to control his or her problem by the time of follow up conversation, it is important to start again.
References
James, R. K., & Gilliland, B. E. (2012). Crisis intervention strategies . Nelson Education.
Séguin, M., & Chawky, N. (2017). Crisis Theory and Intervention Strategies as a Way to Mitigate Suicide Risk. In Handbook of Suicidal Behaviour (pp. 467-483). Springer, Singapore.
Wang, D., & Gupta, V. (2020). Crisis Intervention. In StatPearls [Internet] . StatPearls Publishing.
