Psychological Crisis Intervention

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Reading the texts, it was difficult to pick only three important terms from each chapter. After much thought and deliberation, I found a few that really struck me as being important to both this class, and my personal learning experience. The first important term I chose was defining a psychological crisis. Everly and Mitchell define a psychological crisis as, “a response to a critical incident wherein the individual’s psychological balance has been disrupted” (2008a, pg. 5). I find this important because it forms the foundation upon which this class is based. At some point in person’s lifetime, they will likely suffer from a psychological crisis in one form or another. IT can take the shape of anxiety over an important job interview or being …show more content…
Crisis intervention is the psychological care received by an individual to first stabilize their distress and improve their functioning or provide access to further care (Everly & Mitchell, 2008a, pp. 7-8). Although counseling and psychotherapy may be a part of crisis intervention, they are not the only part involved in intervening. Three significant parts form crisis intervention; proximity entails bringing needed services near the event, immediacy provides the services as soon as possible to those that require it the most, expectancy looks to reduce the impact of the current psychological state of the individual, focusing on the most recent cause for distress (Everly & Mitchell, 2008a, pg. 8). Accordingly, this brings the third important term, Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM). In the past, small group counseling provided the bulk of mental health critical incident response but did not provide for individualized specialty care. Therefore, the idea of Critical Incident Stress Management sought to integrate crisis intervention models with disaster mental health services (Everly & Mitchell, 2008a, pp. …show more content…
I think we can all agree that terrorist acts include those that use violence or the threat of violence against a group of people for political or socioeconomic gains. Terrorist acts directly impact few people, but the idea of terrorism is to cause physical harm to a small group to damage the psychological state of a large group of people. The Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, described psychological toxicity in “The Art of War.” In his view, fighting and winning all battles was did not define supreme excellence; rather breaking the enemy’s resistance with as little fighting was (Everly & Mitchell, 2008b, pg. 22). In recent years, terrorist acts have tried to do just that, break the will of their “enemy” using attacks aimed at a specific person or place to cause panic and fear in the rest of the population, thereby breaking their will to resist. Consequently, this is a driving force behind the psychological contagion effect of terror attacks (Everly & Mitchell, 2008b, pg. 24). Simply stated, fear of further terrorist attacks or attacks occurring near people causes a spread of fear, even when the terrorist attack does not directly impact them. Therefore, it is important to identify psychological counterterrorism and early psychological intervention actions