Critical Incident Stress Management

What is critical incident stress management? It is an intervention procedure primarily and specifically intended for people affected with a traumatic event in their life. It’s a highly structured, formal, and professionally acknowledged process of helping individuals involved in critical incidents to vent emotions, share experiences, and learn about stress symptoms and reactions, as well as being given referrals if further help is needed.

Critical incident stress management is not psychotherapy. It is a voluntary, confidential, and educative procedure which is sometimes known as “psychological first aid”. It was first designed for use in the military for combat veterans, then first responders such as disaster rescuers, firefighters, policemen, ambulance, and emergency workers. Today, it has been used and adapted almost universally where there is need to deal with traumatic impacts in the lives of people.

There are some forms of Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) interventions that may be used, which depends on the situation. These different forms of interventions may be used for individuals, workplace, families, and groups:

Debriefing
This type of critical incident stress management is proactive intervention that involves discussions or group meetings about a specific stressful critical incident. Based on the main principles of “crisis intervention”, the Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) is intended to alleviate the critical incident’s impact to the person, as well as assist in the person’s recovery from the associated stress of the event. Ideally conducted between twenty-four and seventy-two hours after the occurrence, and conducted by peer and professional support personnel.

Defusing
This CISM intervention is a less formal and shorter version of debriefing. It usually lasts about thirty to sixty minutes, but can be longer –best done within one to four hours after the event. Similar to debriefing, it is voluntary and confidential, as well as a chance to know more about stress and share and vent emotions. The main aim is to stabilize affected people, so they can go back to their usual routines.

Grief and Loss Session
This is an individual or group session to assist people in understanding their grief reactions following a death, and creating healthy ambiance of dialogue and openness about death circumstances.

Other forms of CISM include crisis management briefing and pre-crisis education, both of which also aim to assist individuals in coping with critical incident stress.

Critical incident stress management is designed to assist different individuals to handle their trauma and ensure that they are not “dangers to themselves”, while helping them return to more “normal” levels of functioning –although normal may be dissimilar for everyone.

Some studies on the other hand, have “criticized” CISM as showing little effect, or that even worsening trauma symptoms –it has been found beneficial however, with emergency services personnel.