Understanding Crisis and Crisis Intervention

Metastasizing Crisis - Occurs When a Small, Isolated Incident is Not Contained and Begins to Spread

Definitions of Crisis -

• A crisis arises from a traumatic event that is unpredictable and uncontrollable.
• Crisis is a crisis because the individual knows no response to deal with a situation.
• Crisis is a personal difficulty or situation that immobilizes people and prevents them from consciously controlling their lives.
• Crisis is a state of disorganization in which people face frustration of important life goals or profound disruption of their life cycles and methods of coping with stressors. The term crisis usually refers to a person’s feelings of fear, shock, and distress about the disruption, not to the disruption itself.
• Crisis is a temporary breakdown of coping. Expectations are violated and waves of emotions such as anger, anxiety, guilt, and grief surface. Old problems and earlier losses may surface. The event’s intensity, duration, and suddenness may affect the severity of response to the crisis.
• Crisis is a loss of psychological equilibrium or a state of emotional instability that includes elements of depression.
• In a clinical context refers to an acute emotional upset arising from situational, developmental, or sociocultural sources, and results in a temporary inability to cope by means of one’s usual problem-solving devices.
• A crisis may be a catastrophic event or a series of life stresses which build rapidly and accumulate such that the person’s homeostatic balance is disturbed and creates a vulnerable state, which, if not resolved, avoided, or redefined will cause self-righting devices to no longer be effective and plunge the person into psychological disequilibrium.

Basic Crisis Intervention Theory - Following the lead of Lindemann and Caplan, focuses on helping people in crisis recognize and correct temporary affective, behavioral, and cognitive distortions brought on by traumatic events.

The stages in Lindemann’s paradigm are:

1. Disturbed equilibrium
2. Brief therapy or grief work
3. Client’s working through the problem or grief
4. Restoration of equilibrium Caplan linked Lindemann’s concepts and stages to all developmental and situational events and extended crisis intervention to eliminating the affective, behavioral, and cognitive distortions that precipitated the psychological trauma in the first place.

Differentiating Basic Crisis Theory from Brief Therapy - Differentiating between brief or solution-focused therapy and crisis intervention depends on how intensely the client views the problem as intolerable or on how much emotional disequilibrium the client experiences.

Expanded Crisis Theory (i.e., Psychoanalytic Theory) - That the disequilibrium that accompanies a person’s crisis can be understood through gaining access to the individual’s unconscious thoughts and past emotional experiences. Psychoanalytic theory presupposes that some early childhood fixation is the primary explanation of why an event becomes a crisis. This theory may be used to help clients develop insight into the dynamics and causes of their behavior as the crisis situation acts on them.