Week 3: Individual, Couple, and Family Crises

A woman with little formal education and no means of supporting herself or her children feels trapped in an abusive relationship with her husband. A teenager who is failing in school and who recently broke up with his girlfriend sees no point in living. A man who was sexually abused as a child continues to have disturbing flashbacks throughout adulthood. As disparate as these situations appear, they all have one thing in common: they represent types of individual, couple, and family crises. This week, you examine a variety of crises that affect individuals, couples, and families. You explore intervention strategies that are used to address these crises as well as analyze the relationships and differences between these diverse situations.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this week, you should be able to:

· Apply crisis intervention strategies to individual, couple, and family crisis situations

· Analyze similarities and differences between types of individual, couple, and family crises and interventions

· Understand and apply concepts and techniques related to individual, couple, and family crises

Learning Resources

Required Readings

James, R. K. & Gilliland, B.E. (2017). Crisis intervention strategies (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

· Chapter 8, “Crisis of Lethality”

· Chapter 9, “Sexual Assault”

· Chapter 10, “Partner Violence”

Hirsch, J. K., Wolford, K., LaLonde, S. M., Brunk, L., & Parker-Morris, A. (2009). Optimistic explanatory style as a moderator of the association between negative life events and suicide ideation. Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, 30(1), 48–53.

Retrieved from the Walden Library databases. This article examines the relationship between attribution styles (optimistic explanatory and pessimistic explanatory) of negative life events and the incidence of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in young adults.

Optional Resource

James, R. K. & Gilliland, B.E. (2017). Crisis intervention strategies (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

· Chapter 7, “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”

· Chapter 12, “Personal Loss: Bereavement and Grief”

The discussion is needed by Wednesday no later than 10pm

Discussion: Strategies for Individual, Couple, and Family Crisis Intervention

Human services professionals often find themselves enmeshed in the most personal and intimate details of their clients’ lives, perhaps even only a few minutes after meeting them. Such is the nature of individual, couple, and family crisis intervention. As a result, human services professionals must be especially attuned to the nuances of different types of individual, couple, and family crises in order to handle these situations with sensitivity, compassion, and composure. Moreover, human services professionals must enter these situations prepared to use whichever strategies seem most appropriate and necessary in order to secure the safety and well-being of their clients. The selection of these strategies is dictated by the type and nature of the crisis at hand. An individual who seeks help from a human services professional as a result of suicide ideation for example, has far different needs than a woman who has recently left an abusive relationship. Similarly, the intervention strategies used to help a sexual assault survivor will vary considerably from those used to assist a grieving child. As suggested by this week’s Learning Resources, a comprehensive body of empirical research exists about which intervention strategies are best suited for particular types of individual, couple, and family crisis interventions. Human services professionals carry knowledge of this collective body of strategies into every situation they encounter. Determining the most appropriate strategy to use during an individual, couple, or family crisis intervention is an ongoing process for human services professionals. If one strategy does not work, they must be prepared to try a different approach. Thus, it is essential that human services professionals possess an expansive knowledge of crisis intervention strategies for all types of individual, couple, and family crises in order to optimize their abilities to provide effective care for their clients. To prepare for this Discussion:

· Review Chapters 8, 9, and 10 in your course text, Crisis Intervention Strategies. As you read, focus on specific crisis intervention strategies that might be used with individuals, couples, and/or families dealing with crises of lethality, sexual assault, and/or partner violence.

· Review the articles, “Optimistic Explanatory Style as a Moderator of the Association Between Negative Life Events and Suicide Ideation” and “Best Practices for Working With Rape Crisis Centers to Address Elder Sexual Abuse.” Focus on how the implications of the findings discussed in each article, especially specific crisis intervention strategies, may be applied when handling cases involving individual, couple, and/or family crisis situations.

· Select two of the three types of individual, couple, and family crisis situations you have examined in-depth this week: crisis of lethality, sexual assault, and/or partner violence. Reflect on which intervention strategies might be best suited for situations stemming from these two types of crises, and why.

With these thoughts in mind:

By Day 4

Post by Day 4 a brief description of each of the two individual, couple, and/or family crisis situations you selected. Then explain what intervention strategies you might apply to each situation and why. Use specific examples to illustrate your points. Be sure to support your postings and responses with specific references to the Learning Resources.

I need this assignment by Saturday no later than midnight.

Assignment: Comparative Analysis of Individual, Couple, and Family Crises

As you have learned in previous weeks, the scope of crisis is broad, encompassing everything from natural disasters affecting millions of people to a personal loss affecting a single family, couple, or individual. As a result of this extreme variability, it is helpful to organize different types of crisis situations into categories based on fundamental similarities. For example, some crises can be classified as “individual, couple, and family,” such as the following: PTSD, lethality, sexual assault, partner violence, addiction, and bereavement. Although these crises share a classification, they are far from identical. In fact, there is as much variability within the category of “individual, couple, and family crises” as there is within the general designation of “crisis.” One of the major areas of potential contrast is breadth of impact. A situation involving partner violence, for example, may be limited in impact to the two parties involved, particularly if the parties conceal it from others. An individual’s suicide, however, may have the most intense impact on the individual’s direct family members, but is likely to affect others outside of this realm as well, such as friends, neighbors, classmates, and/or coworkers.

In some cases, human services professionals may use similar strategies for different types of crises. A counseling session with a sufferer of PTSD, for example, may in some ways mirror a session with a sexual assault victim. Crisis intervention strategies vary in their effectiveness and in their potential to bring about positive outcomes, depending on both the nature of the crisis itself and the psychological resilience of those experiencing it.

To prepare for this assignment:

· Review Chapters 8, 9, and 10 in your course text, Crisis Intervention Strategies. As you read, focus on the similarities and differences between the three types of individual, couple, and family crisis situations: crisis of lethality, sexual assault, and/or partner violence.

· Review the articles, “Optimistic Explanatory Style as a Moderator of the Association Between Negative Life Events and Suicide Ideation” and “Best Practices for Working With Rape Crisis Centers to Address Elder Sexual Abuse.” Focus on how the issues examined in these articles are either unique to the particular crisis discussed or are shared with the other crises you have examined this week.

· Select two of the three types of crisis situations you have studied this week. (Be sure that one of your selections is different from the two you chose to analyze in this week’s Discussion.) Reflect on how the two types of crisis situations you have selected are similar as well as how they are different, particularly in terms of their breadth of impact, the intervention strategies most often used in response to these situations, their intended outcomes, and the effectiveness of these intervention strategies in achieving these outcomes.

The assignment (2–3 pages):

· Identify and briefly describe the two specific types of individual, couple, and/or family crisis situations you have selected.

· Explain how the two types of crises are similar and how they are different, including, but not limited to the following:

· Their breadth of impact

· Crisis intervention strategies that might be used for each

· The intended outcomes of intervention strategies used for each

· The effectiveness of the outcomes of intervention strategies used for each

· Explain what insights you have or conclusions you can draw based on this comparison.