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Critical Incident Stress Debriefing
CRITICAL INCIDENT STRESS DEBRIEFING
By
Capt. Richard J. Conroy, M.S.
Assistant Chief of Police
Saint Cloud, FL Police Department
* As the first responder to an early
morning pedestrian accident, a police
officer comes across a severed leg
protruding from a shoe lying in the
middle of the highway prior to locating
the victim.
* While stopping his car, a "back-up"
officer responding to a domestic distur-
bance call sees a fellow officer take a
shotgun blast to the stomach just as the
front door to the residence opens without
warning.
* An 18-month-old child is pulled from the
family's backyard pool by the first responding
police officer, only to have the child pro-
nounced dead at the hospital emergency room.
These accounts typify the wide-range of emotionally
traumatic incidents that law enforcement officers may encounter.
As first responders on the scene, they must act without delay,
often without the support or backup of other emergency services
personnel.
Research conducted by Dr. Jeffrey T. Mitchell (1) of the
University of Maryland suggests that almost 90 percent of all
emergency services personnel are affected at least once by
critical incident stress during their careers.
In the past 2 decades, much emphasis has been placed on the
effects of critical incident stress on the emergency services
worker who is not a law enforcement officer. Unfortunately, the
law enforcement community has been rather slow to accept the
fact that critical incident stress can also be a potentially
debilitating syndrome that seriously affects both the job
performance and personal lives of police officers. (2)
CRITICAL INCIDENT STRESS
Critical incident stress can be brought on by any action
that causes extraordinary emotion and overwhelms and impacts on
an individual's normal ability to cope, either immediately
following the incident or in the future. Police officers' human
coping mechanisms are no different than those of others, just
because they carry a badge and a gun. And the myth that police
officers always have total emotional control in all situations is
just that a myth, not a reality.
Any incident that results in deep emotional impact has the
potential to overwhelm an officer's ability to cope. Oftentimes,
it makes the officer come face to face with his or her
vulnerability or sense of mortality, such as in an
officer-involved shooting, the death or serious injury of a
co-worker, prolonged or extraordinary rescue operations, or
life-threatening, dangerous, or ``close'' calls.
For the most part, society expects law enforcement officers
to handle whatever comes their way, to turn emotions on and off
at will. But, is it reasonable to expect police officers to be
all things to all people? And what happens if they can't live up
to the expectations society places on them? Are there solutions
to the problem?
THE DEBRIEFING PROCESS
The Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) process has
been developed in an effort to make law enforcement officers and
emergency service workers understand that they are normal people,
having normal reactions to abnormal events or situations. These
debriefings are not the operational critiques that law
enforcement administrators traditionally schedule after a major
incident. Instead, they are gatherings led by a trained mental
health professional with the assistance of supportive peer
personnel.
The concept behind these debriefings is to encourage free
expression of thoughts, fears, and concerns in a supportive
group environment without losing status among one's peers. In
fact, debriefings are much more successful and the feedback more
positive when peer support personnel are more active. (3)
The debriefing process allows individuals to gain insight
and reframe the event in a different perspective. As short-term
initial intervention, it often aids in preventing some of the
long-term cumulative effects caused by traumatic incidents.
Some departments require personnel to attend a debriefing
session after being involved in a critical stress incident, while
others make attendance a personal choice.
All debriefings are confidential and provide an opportunity
for educating officers on stress responses, as well as letting
those involved know that they are not alone in their thoughts and
feelings. Successful law enforcement debriefings have been
conducted after the Winnetka, IL, school shooting, the Palm Bay,
FL, shopping center shooting, and the Cerritos, CA, air disaster.
DEBRIEFING TEAMS
Debriefing teams are support groups composed of volunteer
trained mental health professionals and emergency workers who
learn to talk with others about job-related stress. The team
counsels others on dealing with the emotional toll of their
professions.
Team members undergo 16 hours of training before they can
conduct a counseling session, which is usually scheduled within
48 hours after emergency workers have been involved in a critical
incident. During the training, these volunteers are taught to
identify critical incidents and the physical and emotional
symptoms resulting from them, as well as delayed stress
reactions.
Team members must also become familiar with a debriefing
model. Basically, this model covers how to get people to
identify what happened, their role in the incident, and what
impact the incident had on them. If additional assistance is
needed after the debriefing session, the individual is given a
list of referrals to contact for one-on-one counseling.
Almost 100 CISD teams across the country operate on
national, statewide, regional, and local levels. These teams
have conducted in excess of 4,500 debriefings for law
enforcement, as well as other emergency services workers since
1983.
A number of larger police agencies have formed their own
departmental teams and have trained peer debriefers, written
operational procedures, and gathered administrative support for
the CISD concept. Other police agencies have networked their
members into county and regional teams where multidisciplinary
resources from police, fire, emergency medical, hospital,
chaplaincy, and mental health are pooled and shared as the need
arises.
LAW ENFORCEMENT CONCERNS
The many administrative misconceptions about police
involvement with mental health professionals are changing. The
philosophies like ``we can handle anything'' and ``it all comes
with the job, take it or leave it'' are becoming archaic.
Police managers who have witnessed officers suffering from a
vast array of emotional, physical, and behavioral symptoms are
beginning to recognize that these conditions can be the resulting
effects of critical incident stress. Employee turnover, sick
leave abuse, an increase in alcohol consumption, extreme
aggressiveness, and substance abuse are just a few of the outward
signs that an officer may need help from the department and
peers.
Training and education in the area of stress management have
become somewhat common practices in the police profession.
Within the past few years, any law enforcement conference,
workshop, or seminar would not be complete without a segment or
speaker on stress management, stress symptoms and their effects.
But, there is still a long road to travel. Agency administrators
need to realize that training programs will be more effective if
they cover more than just the basics of stress education.
Programs should encourage the dissemination of information
specific to critical incident stress and the associated
debriefing process.
CONCLUSION
Providing critical incident stress debriefing services to
law enforcement officers should be no different than giving
officers the proper tools and equipment to perform their jobs
correctly. Agency administrators owe it to their communities to
assist in dealing with the effects of critical incident stress.
The well-being of their departments, officers, and the citizens
they serve depend on it.
FOOTNOTES
(1) Jeffrey T. Mitchell, Roles, Stressors and Supports for
Emergency Workers, National Institute of Mental Health, U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, 1985.
(2) Thomas Pierson, ``Critical Incident Stress: A Serious Law
Enforcement Problem,'' The Police Chief, vol. 66, No. 2, pp.
32-33.
(3) Jeffrey T. Mitchell, Critical Incident Stress Debriefing
Training Seminar, Orlando, FL, April 1989.
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