Assessment and Intervention in Crisis

Question: Discuss about the Assessment and Intervention in Crisis. Answer: Introduction: Crisis can refer to any situation when an individual may pass through a stressful condition after experiencing a traumatic situation and consequentially breaking down. This results in the disruption of normal regular activities harming both their physical and mental health conditions and sub-sequentially family functioning is also hampered. There are different types of crisis that can be stated out of which some are financial crisis (like bankruptcy, payback loans etc), technological crisis (Software failures, industrial accidents), crisis of malevolence (Product tampering, malicious rumors, kidnapping), natural crisis (Tsunami, earthquake), crisis from family violence, crisis from deception (Personal or professional), workplace violence and many more. In other way, one can describe it as an event that would lead to an unstable and unpredictable situation that may become dangerous seeking the life of the victim or the client (Visser, Comans Schuffman, 2014). Protecting people from s uch dangerous situations, through effective counseling and helping them to provide solutions to come out of grief and others are some effective ways of crisis management. A crisis can occur at any moment in the life of an individual which implies that a crisis situation can emerge as an unpredictable situation but it can be stated that they are not always unexpected. A crisis that occurs in the life of an individual leaves the person devastated and its level and strength to affect a person may vary from individual to another individual and their circumstances and consequences may however vary also (Brecher Wilkenfeld, 2014). The individual may also suffer from cardiac issues like shortness in breath, palpitations; excessive sweating which shows disturbed homeostasis in body. Some associated symptoms that may also affect the individual emotions where the clients emotion is severely hurt and his ability to regain back his ability is altered. The behavior of the client gets severely hampered due to the emergence of the crisis. The client may get severely broken down where he loses control over his emotions and seems to behave abnormally. A loss of stability is often observed in his behaviors that points to the loss of control over oneself. These may include screaming or shouting among the individuals where they may harm themselves or others (Dianakar et al., 2015). Fear from certain situations similar to the tragic event or other objects which may make them remember of the tragic events causes them to be startled and avoid such objects. They may get scared to noises, phone calls, unexpected touches and many others. They start living lonely lives, drinking alcohol, behaving rudely with people resulting in complete loss of scoping ability with stresses and crisis (Thornicroft Tansella, 2013). On a cognitive level, one can notice that the client may also undergo severe changes in his cognitive ability to cope with the assignments. He loses concentration from work and also of regular activities which in turn affects his life and peace (Erber, 2014). His problem solving ability is also hampered as the critical thinking capability of the individual is lost. Therefore his way of handling a serious situation gets more intense and unplanned due to loss of proper cognitive abilities. Decision making abilities gets hampered and he becomes startled and confused even while taking small decisions. Overall cognitive abilities are hampered to a great extent. In order to handle such a client who have faced serious crisis recently the professional follows a number of models proposed by researchers to evaluate and analyze the situation entirely so that the professional can get a picturesque image of the situation in front of his eyes which would help the crisis interventionist to guide the victim (France et al., 2015). For that purpose the entire investigating procedure is broken down into a number of steps called the 7 task hybrid model that helps to dissect the crisis in a sequential way. The first step would include the step which is called the predisposition or engaging or initiating a contact with the victim. This step mainly involves the initiation of an interactive session with the client so that an environment of comfort and trust is built among the patient and the professional. This can be initiated by asking questions as in what had brought you here?, how are you this morning? and so on. Specifically asking open needed questions help the professional to understand how his client is tackling the situation that is whether the situation consider grave or critical. The second step includes defining the crisis with an elaborative problem exploration processes where the professional enquires about various instances in their life that might be a cause of the tragic crisis that they were facing. This step usually helps in providing a detailed idea of the past and present day circumstances that might have contributed to the cause of the issue. The client will be asked both open ended and closed ended questions so that the feelings and emotions of the client will reveal in order to let professional understand the background of the crisis which would help them to provide the right solution. This might include open ended question like, what do you think as the main reason that had resulted you in such a situation?. Why do you think that Mr X (Hypothetical) has reacted with you this way? Why are you so hurt?. The third step is mainly concerned with the providing support to the victim. Support can be provided to the individual by making the client feel comfortable and composed followed by providing solutions to their problem. This step also involves them to feel relieved from the stress by sharing their emotions with the professional and feeling light. This is done by How brave of you to handle the situation tactfully?, I notice that you are a very strong person, Dont worry, and take me as your companion The fourth step mainly includes providing alternatives that might help the client to cope with different intense situation like, Why dont you hang out with friends to freshen up yourself?, Why dont you go for a vacation. The fifth step helps in establishing a planning that would help them to gain stability in their life back in such a way that they can have a quality life which had been hampered due to uncertain emergence of the crisis. This can be conveyed to the clients in a way like it would be better for you if you try to think the situation as. If you undertake.it would help you to come out of .. and so on. The sixth step is obtaining commitment from the client. This step includes obtaining promises from the client to perform the activities suggested by the counselors. The way how the client responds will give the counselor an idea of their achievement. It would be said like It is only in your hands and therefore you have to promise that you will.. Or It would be difficult for you but you have to give words that. The last step is the follow up step that usually helps in evaluating the entire summary of the planning that the counselor had provided with casual conversation thereby assuring that the client is stable and can handle themselves and is free from any sort of danger. Questions like So how do you feel after the session. or Do you now believe in yourself that you can. Or so we come to a conclusion that. In order to demarcate the potential challenges that is faced by the professionals while implementing the 7 Task hybrid model into their practice while handling their clients who have faced a serious crisis in life. However before that one needs to know what is crisis and how this model helps in intervention. A potential challenge which is faced by a number of professionals is maintaining and distinguishing each step of the models and its successful application while handling a case. There are many cases where applying the step of alternative strategies is not possible because the crisis is too serious to maintain alternative strategies (Hoefer and Chigbu, 2015). A person suffering from emotional crisis can be given alternative strategies but a person suffering from financial and natural crisis can rarely be provided with any alternative strategies. For example, peter has been emotionally devastated to watch his ex-partner in relationship with another person may breakdown in the midst of a heavy traffic where his life seems in danger. Another challenge also faced by the counselors is connecting with the clients. In certain cases it is noticed that although the clients seek for help but they behave weirdly where they do not properly communicate or disclose what they are actually feeling. In certain cases, it is also found that the clients become arrogant or argumentative over the procedure of the conversation for they become impatient as well as abusive (Zeller, 2013). In such cases, handling the matter with authentic feeling and respect for the client become challenging as well as difficulties. Moreover another problem that is also faced by the professionals is time constraints that mainly arise when the clients do not reveal or answer every part of the model responsibly. It has been seen a lot of times that after revealing an issue that has created a crisis for the client, the professional is supposed to give the intervention. However, while providing the intervention, the client again comes up with issues and causes that were not mentioned previously (James Gilliland, 2015). Again, rearranging the sequences of events again or tackling an entirely new issue after the intervention of the earlier often creates (Kitchingam et al., 2016). Overcoming challenges mentioned above depends greatly upon the professionals who are handling the case. This would help the professional to reject out any causes that include resurfacing of a new issue that the client had missed out (Paige et al., 2015). He should strike the conversation in such a way so that the client doesnt feel that he is talking to a professional representative or a member of bureaucracies in a long line that is not affectionate to his condition. This would rule out any ways of the client being arrogant or silent or not responsive to the professional. This can make the client open up in front of the professional easily (Jais, 2016). The professional should be able to clearly strategize his questions containing both open ended and close ended questions so that there remains no scope of the client in missing out any event that might have led to the crisis that the client is facing. Providing correct questions to the client in a sequenced manner would rule out the possibility that the client has forgotten to mention anything (Spittal et al., 2015). This would help in speedy resolution of the crisis and hence can easily help in overcoming issues. The counselor should have the capability to view the entire crisis from the eyes of the clients. Only then he would be able to tackle the situation correctly and provide correct counseling. The professional should have a core listening skills so that the client doesnt have any sort of beliefs that the opposite person is unable to feel their emotions (Wyatt Silver, 2015). As a result jamming of the phone lines over a particular client can be reduced and more clients can be attended (Rodda et al., 2015). From the entire essay, one can therefore understand that a crisis may emerge all of a sudden in life which may result in several of physical, mental, emotional or financial turmoil. All these can hamper quality life and thereby have impact on lives of clients. A 7 task hybrid model is often followed by professionals to help clients in crisis intervention. This may accompany various challenges that often hamper in the provision of correct intervention to the clients. An efficient professional would be only considered as outstanding who can overcome the challenges, form a very warm relationship with the client and provide their interventions that will make them enjoy life again. References: Brecher, M., Wilkenfeld, J. (2014).A study of crisis. University of Michigan Press. Dinakar, K., Chen, J., Lieberman, H., Picard, R., Filbin, R. (2015, March). Mixed-initiative real-time topic modeling visualization for crisis counseling. InProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces(pp. 417-426). ACM. Dinakar, K., Chen, J., Lieberman, H., Picard, R., Filbin, R. (2015, March). 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