Sometimes Dave Welscher and his team of therapists at St. Elizabeth Healthcare get to prevent emotional scars before they form.
When people experience jarring traumas ““ bank tellers are robbed at gunpoint; police watch a child die from an accidental gunshot; firefighters witness a colleague killed in a blaze ““ the St. Elizabeth Employee Assistance Program and others like it across the country step in to bring relief.
Lending a hand during a difficult time
These kinds of interventions, called Critical Incident Stress Debriefings (CISD), typically last 60 to 90 minutes and help restore normalcy to the person’s mind.
These are different from the counseling sessions that schools often sponsor when a beloved teacher, or when a fellow student dies, leaving those who remain struggling with grief.
For a CISD to be triggered, the people involved must have been at risk of death or injury, or dealt directly with someone who was. So CISDs aren’t for the emergency room colleagues or firefighters who weren’t on shift that day, and simply heard about what happened.
For those people, employer-sponsored Employee Assistance Programs offer regular counseling.
“The goal of CISD is to avoid any type of traumatic or acute stress reaction, potentially culminating in a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder,” Welscher says. “We know from lots of research and experience that people who are exposed to these types of events have a greater potentiality for developing long-term PTSD-like symptoms.”
What happens during CISD
During CISD sessions, therapists talk in great detail about the traumatic event, including what they saw, heard, even smelled.
“We have them go through that to sometimes verbalize a memory they didn’t even realize they had, to get it out so it doesn’t swim around in there and create problems later,” Welscher said.
Therapists spend time advising what symptoms might be experienced in coming days and weeks, such as disturbed sleep, hypervigilance and irritability. And finally, they teach the trauma-sufferers how to reach out for help.
“We also give them some tips and strategies on what to tell loved-ones, and how to ask for help from them,” Welscher says. “Because, for instance, if we have a bank robbery, people who care about you are concerned about you, and they don’t know how to help you, and they’re asking questions, or they’re not wanting to talk about it, and so things that they can do to help.”
“It gives them some overall guidelines on how to make this not be the lingering, lasting effect.”
Stay away from alcohol
One key tip always offered is to stay away from drinking afterward, he says: “We understand a lot of people’s inclination would be to go and have a few drinks, but that’s actually a bad idea in this kind of event. That actually has a greater chance for making this feel worse for you, not better.”
While such Critical Incident Stress Debriefings typically are offered to employers who have EAPs for their workers, companies that do not offer EAPs usually can get assistance for their employees by calling the Kentucky Community Crisis Response Board’s 24-hour toll-free access phone number, (888) 522-7228 to request assistance.
