Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

We've all heard of a Monday Morning Quarterback. They're the folks who stand around the water cooler the day after football Sunday and expound on what the team should have done.

Well, I'm not much of a Monday Morning Quarterback in the traditional sense. I don't watch much football and I don't know whether the team did what they needed to do or not. Any expounding I do on Monday has to do with the ads that ran during the SuperBowl. But that's another blog.

This is not the Monday Morning Quarterback blog, it's the Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback blog. In this blog, I will be expounding on the various critical incidents and traumatic events in the news and how they are being handled from a mental health point of view.

Like most Monday Morning Quarterbacks, it is much easier for me to give advice looking backwards than it is to respond to a crisis as it is unfolding. I have only the utmost respect for those who choose crisis intervention as their life's work, and for those who have crisis intervention thrust upon them without any training or preference on their part at all.

It is the nature of traumatic events that, if we're lucky, any one person will only have to deal with a couple in their lifetime. That makes it hard to learn from our past experiences and use them to do better in the future. And yet, that is the nature of true learning. So what are we to do? Those of us who care about -- or just worry about -- crisis response must learn from other people's experiences, so all of us can stand on each other's shoulders when our own "big one" comes along.

My plan is to write in the next post or two about the global response to H1N1 -- again, looking at it from a critical incident stress point of view. Of course, if something happens in the news that could change my plans. Stay tuned.