Showing posts with label community services. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community services. Show all posts
Monday, November 30, 2009
What if You Survived the Lakewood Police Shootings?
By now you've probably heard about the murder of four uniformed Lakewood, Washington police officers in a coffee shop yesterday morning. There seems to be no doubt that the victims were targeted because they were police officers. Police have a suspect and have been trying to find him in a series of very visible but unsuccessful attempts today.
A lot has been, will be, and should be written about these courageous men and women and their surviving families, including nine children. The spontaneous outpouring of grief and support is amazing. The owner of the coffee shop chain where the shootings occurred is an ex-cop himself, and he said yesterday that since his employees were unhurt he was mostly concerned for the families. Who can blame him?
But the fact of the matter is that there were a handful of other people in the coffee shop when the shootings occurred yesterday -- both staff and patrons. Police have said that it took some time to get full statements from them because it was so hard for them to describe what they saw right away. Who can blame them, either?
It is not uncommon for survivors of shootings, particularly shootings in which multiple people are killed, to feel survivor's guilt. They wonder why they lived when others died. They feel that if only they had done more, they might have saved others. Most often, they find some solace in the knowledge that everyone there was a target, and had they done anything different they might well be among the dead.
This situation is a little different. The other patrons were not, in fact, targets themselves. It seems pretty clear that the gunman was looking to shoot cops. It is not as simple as realizing that they had to save themselves. But in fact, they did have to save themselves. While they may not have been targets to begin with, had they confronted the gunman they undoubtedly would have become targets.
When all is said and done, however, four police officers are dead in a highly publicized and sensational shooting that is making the national news, and the only people in any kind of position to stop it, one might argue, were the staff and other patrons. While we all know that we don't blame them and we don't think they could have stopped this, that probably isn't how they are feeling. That kind of guilt can lead to isolating oneself, and that's a very bad thing to do after a traumatic incident.
Add to this the wrinkle that the gunman is still out there. The survivors have to be concerned, at least on a gut level, for their own safety. They are witnesses, and he clearly doesn't care much about human life. It has to be hard to get up and go out in public under these circumstances.
Most police departments have supports in place for families of officers killed in the line of duty and also for other officers and their families who understandably have renewed fears for other officers' safety. Fewer communities are really set up to support the civilian survivors of an incident like this. This is a time when a community-based CISM team is critical. I hope there is one out there, or that someone asks for one on those people's behalf. They need our support, too.
Update: The suspect in these murders was shot and killed by police on December 1. Hopefully, that will alleviate some small amount of the stress the survivors are experiencing.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Paramedics for the Mind
Last weekend, a glider crashed on takeoff from an airfield in Unadilla Township, Michigan, which is in Livingston County, or the next county over from Ann Arbor, if that means anything to you. A passenger was killed and the pilot seriously injured.
When something like this (and by this I mean any kind of messy event such as a car crash, a suicide, or an industrial accident) happens, EMS and fire and police descend upon the scene. Physical injuries are given first aid and people taken to the hospital. The authorities conduct their investigation. And then those affected -- the victims themselves, the people nearby, the businesses, the neighbors -- are left to their own devices.
I don't know whether crisis intervention services were given to the employees of that airfield, where they have had five crashes, two of them fatal, in the last three years, or to the people who live near the airfield. I also don't know if they needed them. But they sure might have.
Many communities these days have Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) teams that work with civilians. CISM got its start with first responders, and that's still the setting where it is implemented the most systematically, but more and more towns, cities, counties and states are recognizing a need for early crisis intervention in the community. The Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback herself serves on the Traumatic Event Response Network (TERN) for Washtenaw County, Michigan.
However, if your community is like my community, the team doesn't get notified of every event, and we don't "chase cases." We respond when we're asked to. Which requires that people know about us. And I'd venture to guess that if you grabbed 100 people off the street in our county and asked them about crisis response teams, at least 95 of them wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about. In practice, this means that we respond to events where someone involved is or is close to a first responder, where first responders are very much affected and their team (which is coordinated out of the same office) contacts ours, when someone on the team is close to the situation, or when someone knows there must be resources out there, and starts asking around.
This is emblematic of how we think about mental health in our society. Mental health care is not seen as a necessity unless the situation is life threatening. Even those with good insurance tend to have lousy mental health insurance. Traumatic stress is seen as an after-effect, not a primary injury, and so early intervention is not the norm -- we wait to see how people are doing.
Can you imagine if we treated blows to the head the way we treat traumatic stress? We would say, "well, it's possible that you'll have some problems if you have a concussion, so go home and if you don't feel right later, go see a specialist. Your insurance probably won't cover it, by the way." Can you imagine the lawsuits when people started to die? We understand that head injuries need to be evaluated immediately because they can lead to life-threatening problems. Why don't we understand the same about traumatic exposure?
Last month I was sitting in an airport waiting for a plane to go to a conference of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation (ICISF). I was chatting with a man nearby, having the usual, "why are you traveling" discussions. I told him that I am a school administrator and I respond to schools following traumatic events, and he of course made the connection to Columbine. He said, "I don't know what the point of responding is. You just have to say, these kids were crazy, get over it." Then he paused and said, "If you actually saw those shootings, it would mess you up for the rest of your life."
This, too, is the problem with how we look at traumatic stress. We view prevention and/or early intervention as pointless, we tell people to "get over it," and then we accept permanent damage to the psyche as inevitable. Can't we do things a different way?
I envision a world where 911 dispatches CISM the way they dispatch the fire department to a known fire -- if the incident is at all traumatic, someone from the CISM team goes and evaluates the need for a response. Not everything needs it, just like sometimes the fire department shows up and the fire's already out. But couldn't we make it available to everyone, somehow? People like those folks who work at or live near the airfield should not think for a moment they need to go it alone.
When something like this (and by this I mean any kind of messy event such as a car crash, a suicide, or an industrial accident) happens, EMS and fire and police descend upon the scene. Physical injuries are given first aid and people taken to the hospital. The authorities conduct their investigation. And then those affected -- the victims themselves, the people nearby, the businesses, the neighbors -- are left to their own devices.
I don't know whether crisis intervention services were given to the employees of that airfield, where they have had five crashes, two of them fatal, in the last three years, or to the people who live near the airfield. I also don't know if they needed them. But they sure might have.
Many communities these days have Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) teams that work with civilians. CISM got its start with first responders, and that's still the setting where it is implemented the most systematically, but more and more towns, cities, counties and states are recognizing a need for early crisis intervention in the community. The Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback herself serves on the Traumatic Event Response Network (TERN) for Washtenaw County, Michigan.
However, if your community is like my community, the team doesn't get notified of every event, and we don't "chase cases." We respond when we're asked to. Which requires that people know about us. And I'd venture to guess that if you grabbed 100 people off the street in our county and asked them about crisis response teams, at least 95 of them wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about. In practice, this means that we respond to events where someone involved is or is close to a first responder, where first responders are very much affected and their team (which is coordinated out of the same office) contacts ours, when someone on the team is close to the situation, or when someone knows there must be resources out there, and starts asking around.
This is emblematic of how we think about mental health in our society. Mental health care is not seen as a necessity unless the situation is life threatening. Even those with good insurance tend to have lousy mental health insurance. Traumatic stress is seen as an after-effect, not a primary injury, and so early intervention is not the norm -- we wait to see how people are doing.
Can you imagine if we treated blows to the head the way we treat traumatic stress? We would say, "well, it's possible that you'll have some problems if you have a concussion, so go home and if you don't feel right later, go see a specialist. Your insurance probably won't cover it, by the way." Can you imagine the lawsuits when people started to die? We understand that head injuries need to be evaluated immediately because they can lead to life-threatening problems. Why don't we understand the same about traumatic exposure?
Last month I was sitting in an airport waiting for a plane to go to a conference of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation (ICISF). I was chatting with a man nearby, having the usual, "why are you traveling" discussions. I told him that I am a school administrator and I respond to schools following traumatic events, and he of course made the connection to Columbine. He said, "I don't know what the point of responding is. You just have to say, these kids were crazy, get over it." Then he paused and said, "If you actually saw those shootings, it would mess you up for the rest of your life."
This, too, is the problem with how we look at traumatic stress. We view prevention and/or early intervention as pointless, we tell people to "get over it," and then we accept permanent damage to the psyche as inevitable. Can't we do things a different way?
I envision a world where 911 dispatches CISM the way they dispatch the fire department to a known fire -- if the incident is at all traumatic, someone from the CISM team goes and evaluates the need for a response. Not everything needs it, just like sometimes the fire department shows up and the fire's already out. But couldn't we make it available to everyone, somehow? People like those folks who work at or live near the airfield should not think for a moment they need to go it alone.
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Meet the Quarterback
- Naomi Zikmund-Fisher
- is a clinical social worker, former school Principal and a Crisis Consultant for schools and community organizations. You can learn more about her at www.SchoolCrisisConsultant.com
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