Critical Incident Stress Debriefing

The Shreveport Fire Department has been involved with Critical Incident Stress Management since 1988. In that time, our team has been called upon hundreds of times to provide debriefings, defusing, and crisis interventions both locally and nationally. Among these are line-of-duty deaths, death/injury to children, mass casualty incidents, and various traumatic incidents. Large scale events have included the Oklahoma bombing, Hurricane Andrew, and several local tornado disasters.

Critical Incident Stress can be most simply defined as s syndrome in which an emergency service worker responds to serious events, and is unable to cope with what he or she experiences at the scene, hours, days, or even weeks later. An emergency worker, no matter how directly involved, no matter what age, regardless of the level of experience, can suffer. In fact, 87% of all police, firefighters, emergency nurses, and doctors suffer from the effects of Critical Incident Stress during their careers.

In the history of Critical Incident Stress there were four major influences, which set the foundation for Critical Incident Stress Management, that can be identified. They are:

*Warfare

*Disasters

*Law Enforcement Psychology

*Emergency medical, fire, and hospital services.

Stress has been part of the human experience since the very beginning of time. No one would survive without it. At best, it is a creative, driving force, which can drive people to survive; to find great happiness and achieve incredible accomplishments. At worst, it is a destructive force, which can deprive people of joy, health, sanity, relationships with others, and even life itself.

*Emergency Medical, Fire, and Hospital Services

The last major influence on the development of the Critical Incident Stress Management process and the many services, which have developed into the Critical Incident Stress Management program, was, in fact, not a single group but a combined set of influences. Stress Management work in hospitals, emergency medical services program and in fire departments set the final segment of the Critical Incident Stress Management foundation. All of the influences were independent upon one another. In fact the final stages of development of the process could never have been accomplished without the history which had proceeded in the military, law enforcement and disaster fields.

Critical Incident Stress Management is a structured process and is designed to be "comprehensive". By using the term comprehensive we mean that the Critical Incident Stress Management program spans the entire 3 phases of the crisis spectrum: 1. The pre-crisis phase (before the incident is happens) 2. The acute crisis phase (while the incident is happening) 3. The post-crisis phase (after the incident has happened).

CISM aims are simple: 

A. maintain health and productivity.

B. Prevent traumatic stress effects.

C. Mitigate stress effect

D. Restore personnel to normal functions.

E. Speed recovery from stress.

G. Confidentiality should be maintained about discussed issues

CISM issue should transcend administrative/supervision/operational/union/manage-ment/territorial/political, and organizational issues.

CISM is the standard of care.

Critical Incident Stress Management is not psychotherapy but a crisis intervention by trained peers and mental health professionals.