"Lessons Learned" is a series of publications that are a brief recounting of actual school emergencies and crises. This "Lessons Learned" issue addresses the experience of a school district where three middle school students hung themselves within a three-week timeframe. Although deaths were apparently unconnected, the school district is part of a…

The adolescent suicide rate in the United States has tripled in the last 25 years. While suicides cause tremendous familial complications, this act also causes significant upheaval in the public school environment. The purpose of this paper is to offer an updated theoretical rationale as to why children and early adolescents are choosing suicide…

Crisis intervention requires that the person experiencing crisis receive timely and skillful support to help cope with his/her situation before future physical or emotional deterioration occurs. This Digest provides a brief, conceptual overview of crisis intervention, and summarizes the steps a worker may use to assist an individual experiencing…

Each week the equivalent of fifty 48-passenger bus loads of students do not return to school because they have died. Created to foster successful responses to crisis situations, this book serves as a step by step reference guide for school administrators, counselors, and other faculty. Techniques are presented for dealing with: (1) murders; (2)…

This document presents a workbook and facilitator's notes designed for use with small groups or with individual students in secondary schools to help them cope with troubling events related to the Gulf War. The material contained in the workbook is designed to help students deal with each of seven stages that the mastery model sees individuals…

The importance of volunteers in the provision of mental health crisis intervention services has been well documented. However, the volunteer turn-over rate is quite high, due to factors such as burnout. This study examined stressfulness in relationship to caller problems, as well as variables related to perceptions of stress. In this study…

This manual represents a state-of-the-art summary of approaches in child sexual abuse interventions, emphasizing interdisciplinary cooperation between professionals in successful case management. Although prepared specifically for the use of professionals in Region II of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services and containing a service…

A study analyzed the use of third-party credibility as a deliberate and systematic public relations strategy to regain credibility for an organization faced with public hostility. Four types of third-party usage are: citizen participation, outside investigation, adversarial advocacy, and employee dissemination. Third-party credibility as a public…

This report is an evaluation of the Youth Crisis Center program run by the Wichita, Kansas Children's Service League to provide crisis counseling services to status offenders. Two major objective of the program were to reduce the number of adjudicated status offenders in Sedgwick County, Kansas; and to reduce placement of such youth in locked…

Hotlines, or telephone crisis-lines, begun in the 1960s and currently numbering in the hundreds provide assistance to callers in crisis, frequently around the clock. Crisis-line communication can be seen as a form of mediated therapeutic communication premised on the existence of a crisis and the medium of the telephone which shapes the…

Attributions affect coping with victimization. Battered women who blame their husbands' moods are less likely to leave than are women who blame their husbands' permanent characteristics for the violence. Abused women often have repeated contacts with crisis intervention workers and the attitudes of those workers may affect the attributions made by…

This document presents a program for training volunteers to assist individuals and families who are going through a crisis related to terminal illness and death. The training is described as being both didactic and experiential. A discussion of the didactic portion of the program includes descriptions of: (1) the stages of preparatory grief as…

Described are the services offered by helplines, an innovation in the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect modeled after the crisis intervention hotlines. It is explained that child abuse and neglect helplines have two primary functions: to provide the parent or child caller with a sympathetic, nonjudgemental listener; and to offer…

This paper presents an overview of problems confronting crime victims, identifies service approaches to assist crime victims, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of providing victim advocate services as part of comprehensive crisis intervention centers. Victims not only may bear the suffering of financial loss and emotional trauma as a…

The shift in mental health delivery systems from a centralized to a decentralized community-based system requires quality service standards from both a professional and a service implementation viewpoint. The present paper sets forth the basic and preliminary structure for standards for crisis outreach services. Definitions are presented which…