About CISM Courses
Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) is designed to help first responders deal with trauma one incident at a time, by allowing them to process the incident when it happens without judgment or criticism. The program is peer-driven and the people conducting the interventions may come from all walks of life, but most are first responders (Police, Fire, emergency medical services) or work in the mental health field.

Critical incidents are traumatic events that cause powerful emotional reactions in people who are exposed to those events. The most stressful of these are line of duty deaths, co-worker suicide, multiple event incidents, delayed intervention and multi-casualty incidents. Every profession can list their own worst-case scenarios that can be categorized as critical incidents.

CISM courses teach models of intervention designed to help first responders quickly return to service.

Assisting Individuals in Crisis & Group Crisis Intervention

Course Description:
This 3-day course combines ALL of the content of ICISF’s Assisting Individuals in Crisis & Group Crisis Intervention courses.

Crisis Intervention is NOT psychotherapy; rather, it is a specialized acute emergency mental health intervention which requires specialized training. As physical first aid is to surgery, crisis intervention is to psychotherapy. Thus, crisis intervention is sometimes called “emotional first aid”. Designed to present the core elements of a comprehensive, systematic and multi-component crisis intervention curriculum, this course will prepare participants to understand a wide range of crisis intervention services for both the individual and for groups. Fundamentals of Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) will be outlined and participants will leave with the knowledge and tools to provide several group crisis interventions, specifically demobilizations, defusings and the Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD). The need for appropriate follow-up services and referrals when necessary will also be discussed.

This course is designed for anyone in the fields of Business & Industry Crisis Intervention, Disaster Response, Education, Emergency Services, Employee Assistance, Healthcare, Homeland Security, Mental Health, Military, Spiritual Care, and Traumatic Stress.

Program Highlights:

Psychological crisis and psychological crisis intervention
Resistance, resiliency, recovery continuum
Critical incident stress management
Evidence-based practice
Basic crisis communication techniques
Common psychological and behavioral crisis reactions
Putative and empirically-derived mechanisms
SAFER-Revised model
Suicide intervention
Relevant research findings
Large group crisis interventions
Small group crisis interventions
Adverse outcome associated with crisis intervention
Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD)