Reclaiming process in crisis intervention: a review of critical incident stress debriefing

Proceso de reclamo en la intervención en crisis: una revisión del proceso de "debriefing" de incidentes graves de estress.

Critical Incident Stress Debriefing provided a useful psychosocial tool in crisis intervention at a time when few models were available. It formalised processes of group support, which emerged spontaneously after tragedy struck a community. However, its rapid spread led to poor implementation and practice with many deviations from its origina l aims and applications. Many myths about its goals and protocol emerged and these were perpetuated by research and reports in professional journals. Ill-informed media headlines have in turn linked this research to quite different contexts, causing problems for practitioners working at the front-line.

This paper explores how the rapid take-up of debriefing created the view that one fixed solution with quantifiable outcomes should be the preferred intervention, even in situations for which it wasn't designed, and sometimes to the exclusion of a wider range of creative approaches to healing. I also consider how traditional research styles favor interventions, which require controlled situations and exclude the self-determining and variable nature of human beings. It argues for:

1. A return to the original use of the term debriefing and the renaming of methods which confuse its use,
2. An examination of the underlying assumptions and practice in recent research and why alternative research methods are needed,
3. Good quality assessments and the development of approaches which allow practitioners to work more flexibly with the process of the group or individual while also dealing with the task in hand.