Crisis Intervention

Crises can be broadly categorised into two groups based on their cause. There are natural crises or disasters, which occur naturally, and man has no control over their happenings such as earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods among others. On the other hand, there are human based crises that arise from human actions such as violence, crime, rape, kidnap, loss of a loved one among others. The occurrence of the crises can easily lead the victims to the situation in which they will be unable to solve them suitably or cope with their aftermath. Therefore, there is a dire need to come up with an effective crisis intervention strategy that should be provided in well-structured, and in humanistic manner with close focus on individuality of the victim and the needs that the person requires.

Crisis intervention has got several objectives, one of which is the reduction of the extent of the victim's reaction to a crisis that may be behavioural, physical or mental. Another aim is to help the victims go back to his or her normal state, disrupted during the crisis occurrence. This is possible through the use of variety of coping skills and eliminating ineffective coping skills. Ineffective coping skills eliminated would include withdrawal, substance abuse and even aloofness. This will help the victim to cope with such happenings in the future with relative ease. Prevention of long-term problems to the victim is easy when the victim opens up and talks about what happened. However, this depends on an individual as some victims could be open and talk about the crisis while others might not want to talk about it. The process of crisis intervention is, however, not suitable to people with longstanding problems.

A crisis intervention process takes place in some systematic stages. Initially, it is essential to conduct an assessment of the nature of the crisis, and how the victim responded to it. This proves remarkably vital since there are several patterns of response, those calls for different kinds of intervention mechanisms. People react differently to crises. One might decide to harm himself as a result, commit suicide, harm others and become dizzy or even panic a lot. The knowledge of this helps to assess the coping skills of the victim.

Current and future crisis intervention strategies, unlike in the past, need to incorporate education in its structure. This education should be aimed at equipping the victims with the several response mechanisms with the aim of preventing abnormal reactions to normal situations. This, therefore, entails equipping the victims with amicable coping skills of solving problems. Ways that an individual has been using to respond to a crisis could be enhanced during the education process. On the other hand, new coping skills could be encouraged. In this way, the individual gets the motivation to air out his concerns and fears instead of keeping them within.

Another future trend in crisis intervention is problem solving. This would involve problem understanding and statement of the changes desired and alternatives for solving a given situation. The merits and demerits of each solution could then be evaluated too.

Cognitive therapy is also another useful future trend in crisis intervention. It bases on the argument that thoughts have an influence on one's feelings and behaviour and knowledge of this could be used in the intervention of crises. The final stage of this trend could review the changes made by the victim in order to deal with difficult life events more easily instead of keeping them inside of his mind.

The inception of the future trends in will thence bring a number of impacts in the crisis intervention within the human services field. One of the impacts it will have is the restructuring of the legislature of the crisis intervention in order to incorporate the future trends. On another hand, one social worker may not be adequate to meet all the requirements of a client, referrals, and community resources. It will hence require the helping hand of non-profit agencies in order to deliver these services.

The future trend in crisis intervention will also call for inclusion of trained professionals in the health sector, therapist and counsellors to attend to the victim's needs. There will be need also to research for statistics