Crisis Intervention and Prevention in the Field of Counseling

Crisis intervention and prevention has been growing in the counseling field. There are many different approaches to crisis intervention and prevention, however, each crisis is different and each agency usually employs different approaches in a crisis situation. This paper explores different strategies in crisis intervention and prevention practices, with a focus on disasters and suicide crisis intervention and prevention.

Crisis interventions should be organized and well planned for them to be useful in crisis situations. As noted by Rosen, Greene, Young and Norris (2010) crisis counseling has become an important component of schools and community agencies to name a few, especially to the federal government, rendering assistance to communities recovering from disasters such as hurricanes and fires and other major casualty crisis. They noted culture and ethnicity is an important role in how people react and recover after disasters (Rosen et al., 2010). Disasters can, and does affect everyone from different ethnicities, but people from disadvantaged racial and ethnic communities, such as Blacks in New Orleans are often more severely affected, and encounter more difficulty recovering from the disaster. A factor that can affect minorities’ ability to recover is economic. Minorities usually have greater unmet needs after a natural disaster and are less able to handle economic losses due to disasters, which can in turn affect their mental health when they are burdened with necessities of life and trying to cope and live one day at a time with no one to turn to for support and real help. Minorities are often underserved in the use of conventional mental health services as noted by (Rosen et al., 2010) as was seen after Hurricane Katrina,...

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...pport, help restore their hope and help them envision other possibilities and to develop resilience. Strep six is the use of behavioral approaches, which entails drafting a short term and positive action plan, and the use of a safety plan for client. Step seven the final step is to follow up, which entails incorporating the concept of funneling, and ensuring quality follow up care.

As mentioned crisis intervention and prevention is a growing approach in the counseling field. All aforementioned steps and tasks are concrete and useable strategies that can be used, and is proven by various researches to manage different crisis situations. All strategies are helpful in crisis intervention, and provide mental health counselors with practical methods for engaging in crisis intervention approaches with suicidal clients, disaster events and other types of crisis situations.