The Need

Throughout life each of us responds to crises on a regular basis. Some are personal, some involve family and friends. To a certain extent we survive and mature in developing resistance, resilience to, and recovery from, the disasters of life.


Beyond the normal there are those whose life's work is disaster response. For them additional tools and skills are needed to provide added safeguards to the consequences of exposure to crisis. 

And there are volunteers who choose to assist others in their crises;
/ Faith community disaster responders
/ Red Cross volunteers
/ FEMA and other governmental personnel
/ Other NGO disaster agency personnel

Statistics

° Over 80% Americans will be exposed to a traumatic event (Breslau)
° About 9% of those exposed develop PTSD (40-70% IN RAPE, TORTURE) (Surgeon General, 1999)
° Disasters may create significant impairment in 40-50% of those exposed (Norris, 2001, SAMHSA)
° About 50% of disaster workers likely to develop significant distress (Myers & Wee, 2005)
° TERRORISM is likely to adversely impact a majority of the population (IOM, 2003); Ranges from ~40-90% (JHU, 2005)


PTSD PREVALENCE:
› 10-15% of LAW ENFORCEMENT PERSONNEL (see Everly & Mitchell, 1999)
› 10-30% of those in FIRE SUPPRESSION (see Everly & Mitchell, 1999)
› 16% VIETNAM VETERANS (Nat PTSD Study)
› ~12% IRAQ WAR VETERANS (NEJM, 2004)
› One in Five combat VETERANS OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress or Depression (RAND Corp, 2008)
› As many as 45% of those directly exposed to MASS DISASTERS may develop PTSD or Depression (North, et al., 1999, JAMA)

The Resources

Additional instruction in the development of emotional and spiritual resources in disaster are available through our parent corporation at www.GraceUnlimited.net/training.htm

The International Critical Incident Stress Foundation (www.icisf.org) has emerged as primary in education and training for the crisis responder. Individual Crisis Intervention and Peer Support is an ICISF core course.

The International Critical Incident Stress Foundation provides training materials, certificates of completion, and 13 contact hours for continuing education applicable to educational and professional associations.

To read the ICISF catalog description for this course, click here.

For those who wish to develop a Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) Team, group training is available. See our offering of the Group Crisis Intervention course. The focus of the ICIPS course is one-with-one training to provide early detection of individual distress and a system of crisis intervention techniques that can provide personal support.

Peer support within emergency response teams and departments is made effective through knowledge of expected, versus concern-producing, effects of a critical incident. Therefore police, fire, EMS, dispatch and hospital agencies are nationally prime requesters of this course.

This training is also applicable to churches, funeral homes, hospice workers, mental health professionals, health care, Homeland Security, Military, Spiritual Care, Disaster Responders, and any others who might encounter a person in crisis.

 

Today we know that debriefings are critical. In these violent times we hold each other's lives in our hands and we are morally obligated to be there for each other.

Lt. Col Dave Grossman, developer of
The Bulletproof Mind,
from his book On Combat