Crisis intervention

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Crisis intervention is a role that fits exceedingly well with counseling psychologists’ interests and skills. This article provides an overview of a new crisis intervention model, the Integrated Problem-Solving Model (IPSM), and demonstrates its application to a specific crisis, sexual assault. It is hoped that this article will encourage counseling psy- chologists to become more involved in crisis intervention itself as well as in research and training in this important area.

Recently, significant crisis events (e.g., sexual assaults, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and other violent crimes) have received major media atten- tion. This has led, among other things, to an increased interest in this topic as a subspecialty among human service providers (James & Gilliland, 2001). In addition, it appears that we live in an increasingly fast-paced and technologi- cal society in which individuals may be less connected with family and other positive influences than in the past (Pitcher & Poland, 1992). Mental health professionals need to be prepared to help society cope with such crises, and counseling psychologists are particularly well suited for this type of interven- tion. Coping with life transitions, a major focus of counseling psychology throughout its history, sometimes involves the successful negotiation of cri- ses (Brown & Lent, 2000). Counseling psychologists are particularly skilled in promoting self-enhancement among relatively healthy individuals, which is often the case in crisis situations. In addition, crisis intervention matches well with counseling psychologists’ skills at implementing brief, problem- solving, developmental, educational, and self-empowering intervention approaches.

Relatively few articles have been published in The Counseling Psycholo- gist concerning crisis intervention and the role of the counseling psycholo-

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Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John S. Westefeld, Coun- seling Psychology, 361 Lindquist Center, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242; e-mail: john-westefeld@uiowa.edu.

gist. Indeed, we believe that the field of counseling psychology has not his- torically seen itself as working extensively in this area. Interestingly, in 1979—more than 20 years ago—Baldwin published an excellent manuscript in The Counseling Psychologist, wherein he reviewed crisis theory, discussed types of crises, and described his own stage model of crisis intervention. Baldwin’s model consisted of the following major steps: catharsis/assess- ment, focusing/contracting, intervention/resolution, and termination/inte- gration. Since 1979, however, there has been little in this journal explicitly dealing with the topic of generic crisis intervention per se as a major role of counseling psychologists. A review of the articles written concerning the last major counseling psychology conference (the Georgia conference) (Weissberg et al., 1988) yields few indications that crisis intervention per se has been an explicit major area of concern for the field of counseling psychol- ogy. However, it should be noted that in our view, things are changing. At the Fourth National Conference for Counseling Psychology (the Houston con- ference), a large number of work/social action groups addressed a wide spec- trum of social issues, many of which relate to crisis intervention. In addition, it is important to note that The Counseling Psychologist recently published a major contribution on suicide (Westefeld et al., 2000), which is obviously a crisis-laden phenomenon. Because we believe that crisis intervention is an emerging and important area for counseling psychologists, we present this article in an effort to augment the current knowledge base in this area. Rather than review the numerous existing crisis intervention models (e.g., Baldwin, 1979; James & Gilliland, 2001; Roberts, 1991), this article presents the authors’ Integrated Problem-Solving Model (IPSM) of crisis intervention, which is based on many of the principles of the specialty of counseling psy- chology as a profession. We then present an exemplar of how this model may be used in a specific type of crisis that counseling psychologists may encoun- ter: sexual assault.