Compare and contrast the steps of the immediate crisis response.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

?Engage the client and provide emotional support:
When you are seeing a client in the midst of crisis, you need to communicate that you are there to provide help, both by listening and by providing concrete assistance in dealing with the difficulty.
Use all of your best listening and engagement skills to communicate this support as well as to communicate your availability and capacity to assist.
Communicate respect and regard for your client as well as your belief that things will get better. Be a purveyor of realistic hope. The first critical task of the counselor dealing with someone in crisis is to make an emotional connection.
The communication of steadiness, caring, and support can make all the difference to someone who feels adrift in a swamp of bad feeling and distress.
?Explore the specifics of the crisis and assess client strengths:
Do what you can to find out about the specifics of the situation. What events have precipitated this current difficulty? How long has this been going on? Who are the people involved? What are the immediate dangers and risks accompanying this crisis? How grounded in reality is this person, and has there been a history of other crises that you can find out about?
Use engagement and fact-finding questions to flesh out the dimensions of the problems, make a preliminary estimate of key client strengths and deficits, and assess what best should be done. This process is very much like the assessment you would do with any client, but it has an added sense of immediacy, drama, and, sometimes, risk.
In addition, external supports and resources should be identified as part of this assessment process. These are the people, the agencies, and the services that might be enlisted to help in the event that this client’s own internal resources prove insufficient, for whatever reason.
?Quickly develop a solid plan for longer-term crisis management:
Every crisis response should culminate in a specified plan for what will happen after the immediate situation is brought under control.
Crisis planning may happen for groups, as well as individuals . . . as with a school that has just suffered a traumatic event. This plan and its implementation generally become part of a longer “crisis counseling” process that follows the immediate crisis intervention.
These two components—the crisis intervention and the longer process of crisis counseling—combine for an effective crisis response.
Just as a concrete plan should be articulated for any counseling relationship, so should it be integral to any crisis counseling process. Support and exploration set the stage for creation of the plan for longer-term counseling. This plan specifies who will do what. What will be the client’s responsibility? What will be the counselor’s? What other services, or people, will be involved and in what capacity? What is the time frame of the plan, and how frequently will it be reviewed? What are the contingency plans if someone, or some event, breaks the contract? Most critically, what are the immediate dangers and risks that need to be considered? Is the client capable of managing the response to those dangers, or should the plan call for mobilization of outside assistance?
At the conclusion of any brief crisis intervention process, the plan should be outlined in a written contract that is clearly understood by all parties involved. These contracted plans will not always work. Some clients, because of severe temporary or more chronic impairment, will not be able to manage what they said they would do. Some clients will actively or passively subvert their own contracts (addicted client behavior is a classic example of this).
Sometimes external forces, such as physical illness or moving (an event over which your clients who are children have little control), will impinge on the agreed-upon course of action.
You can safely assume that even a contract written with full client support and complicity in the light-of-day sanctity of your office stands a great chance of falling apart in the wee hours of the morning far away from your workplace. This is the nature of crisis intervention, an enterprise fraught with difficulties and human frailty.
Your client in crisis is under tremendous pressure of both internal and external origins, and you need to recognize that your best brief intervention is at the least a tourniquet to stop the emotional bleeding and at its best the foundation for more long-lasting structural change