Crisis, Trauma, and Disaster Response

As a Human Services Professional Practitioner, you will often have to deal with service users experiencing crisis. Knowing how to best help a service user requires that you understand what constitutes a crisis and how different types of crises may require different kinds of responses from you.

For example, each of these service users in the following examples may be in crisis stemming from the loss of their father. However, each crisis is different:

Jacob, age 11, has not seen his father since his parents divorced one year ago.

Clarissa, age 72, just lost her father after a prolonged illness.

Samuel, age 32, just lost his father last night in a devastating earthquake.

Kenda, age 25, is about to get married. Her father died while serving in the army when she was two years old.

Your role and responsibility to each of these service users may change based on the type of crisis each is experiencing. In your Discussion this week, you will describe and compare different categories of crises as well as examine how your roles and responsibilities can change depending on the crisis.\

Post the following:

• Define what constitutes a crisis and provide an example of a critical incident in each of the following categories of crises: developmental, ecosystemic, existential, and situational.
• Select two of the examples you provided and:
  • Explain the similarities and differences in the two critical incidents you selected.
  • Compare the roles and responsibilities you would have in each of the critical incidents you selected.