Crisis intervention ethics casebook
"This case book is about crises. It is not about trauma or disaster, although certainly crises occur in both. Overlap of the three areas exist, and while crisis intervention is practiced with traumatic events ranging from lethal auto wrecks to natural disasters, it is very different from long-term trauma therapy. Crisis intervention may include assisting someone who is suicidal or homicidal, but also includes non-life threatening situations such as child custody fights, school failure, drug use, and a host of other situational and transient problems (Myer & James, 2007). In contrast, trauma counseling often follows crisis intervention with people who are not able to re-establish a daily routine because the memory of the incident creates an independent schema that affects functioning over a period of time (McFarlane & Yehuda, 1996). That said, there are different types of crises and we will attempt to portray some of those and the ethical issues that may accompany them. Before going further, we want you know that while writing this book, something became clearer to us. Through our experiences, we knew that the application of ethical principles during crisis intervention is awkward at best, and nearly impossible in the worst-case scenario. How do you maintain confidentiality when working in a Red Cross shelter with a person or family whose house has been destroyed by a wildfire? People are walking around, and you are not in a comfortable private office. What does a crisis worker do when someone is unable to make a phone call to get information or much needed resources? How will the client get the assistance that will help restore a sense of control? You, as the crisis worker, may need to make that phone call to help the person. We found that applying ethical principles in crisis intervention is like putting a square peg into a round hole. Not matter what you do; there are gaps. Please don't misunderstand, we are not suggesting that ethical principles do not apply to crisis intervention work. Rather we are attempting to find a way to apply them in a way that makes sense, and we believe the concepts of Relational Cultural Theory (RCT) (Jordan 2018; Miller 1976; Duffey & Haberstroh, 2020) is a framework to fill in those gaps"--