Chrisis Intervention

Put simply, crisis intervention is the intervening of a professional just before there is a crisis. This term is used both in personal situations and political situations. People can be trained for years regarding how to handle a possible crisis situation with ease and confidence.

The first step to effective crisis intervention is to take time to assure the people surrounded and involved in the crisis that there is no reason to panic. Often, a crisis escalates because the mass of people involved panic and run for the door. This was the case in the time just before the Great Depression. Because people chose to panic and withdraw their money from the stock market, the market crashed and a bad situation got a whole lot worse. Someone who is skilled at intervening will know what to say and do in order to de-escalate the crisis and therefore keep it from getting any worse. An example of a good intervention is President Obamas choice to meet the current economic crisis head on to show that someone is at the helm and nothing will get too out of control.

After the crisis has been de-escalated, crisis intervention states that there should then be a period of processing. During this time, you talk about what went wrong, why and how to prevent it from happening again in the future. This is a chance for the people involved to take responsibility for the crisis and also understand how to solve the problem, should it occur in the future.

The basic idea of crisis intervention is decreasing the possibility of the herd mentality that has tendency to occur in high stress situations. You see it a lot in movies and in the midst of terrible disasters; people panic and run around in circles instead of actually finding a way out. The same thing can happen in crisis situations if there is not a calm voice telling everyone to simmer down. After the situation has been resolved, it is also that calm voices job to explain the situation to people, so that they will not be doomed to repeat their history.