This is Not a Firedrill

Crisis Intervention and Prevention on College Campuses

Rick A. Myer, Richard K. James, Patrice Moulton

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780470458044
• eBook ISBN: 9780470926796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Practical Information and Tools to Create and Implement a Comprehensive College Campus Crisis Management Program

Written by three seasoned crisis intervention/prevention specialists with over fifty years combined experience in the field, This is NOT a Fire Drill: Crisis Intervention and Prevention on College Campuses is a practical guide to creating a comprehensive college campus crisis management program.

Authors Rick Myer, Richard James, and Patrice Moulton provide university administrators, faculty, and staff with invaluable hands-on examples, general tactics, and strategies along with specific prevention, intervention, and post-crisis logistics and techniques that can be applied to almost any crisis likely to be confronted on a college campus.

This is NOT a Fire Drill features a host of helpful resources, including:

• A proven individual/organization assessment tool to ensure school professionals and staff take appropriate action to protect students, the college, and the community
• Thought-provoking case examples, activities, and illustrative dialogues that provide opportunities for reflection and practice
• A checklist to get a crisis prevention and intervention plan for human dilemmas up and running
• A decision-tree model to guide the response and recovery to crisis

This is NOT a Fire Drill provides the necessary tools to address the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses of students and staff as they attempt to negotiate a crisis and its aftermath.

1

… Or a Tornado or Earthquake Drill

Miracle on 34th Street is a Christmas classic, a movie about a little girl who wanted to believe in Santa Claus, but her mom, an upwardly mobile executive at Macy’s, was a hardnosed realist who dismissed Santa Claus as a myth. If you have seen the movie, you will perhaps remember the character of Kris Kringle, who was played by Ed Gwenn. One of the great scenes in that movie was when Kris Kringle told a mother that Gimbel’s department store, a competitor of Macy’s, had the particular toy she was looking for. At first the manager was appalled and wanted to fire Kris, but then when upper management found out that it increased customer respect and loyalty, everybody on the sales staff was told to be helpful and direct customers to other stores if Macy’s didn’t have the particular product they were looking for. We’re going to do the same thing here. If you are really serious about the business of preventing, intervening, and following up in the traumatic wake of violence on your campus, we believe there are three books that need to make the cut on your reading list.

The first book is by Eugene Zdziarski and his associates, Campus Crisis Management (2007). It is a comprehensive guide to planning, prevention, response, and recovery of environmental, facility, and human crises in a college setting. It takes an in-depth look at the intricacies of managing all kinds of crisis on a college campus.

The second book is Nicoletti, Spencer-Thomas, and Bollinger’s Violence Goes to College (2001). It’s about 10 years old, but it is still a really great book for understanding, preventing, and planning how to stop violence on college campuses. It covers a variety of violence typologies and also provides information on how to build intervention strategies to combat potentially virulent episodes that can metastasize and spread across a campus.

The third book is Grayson and Meilman’s College Mental Health Practice (2006), which gives a graphic portrayal of what practitioners in college counseling centers are dealing with in regard to contemporary students. These editors have done an excellent job of providing the reader with a comprehensive view of the legal and ethical, developmental, and diversity issues that undergird a variety of mental disorders and acute and chronic crises that go far beyond homesickness, flunking English, and broken romances.

We think so highly of these authors and what they have to say that we have referenced them a lot in this book. Now that we have told you about these three great books, you may be wondering why in the world you bought this one. So why, indeed, read this book? We do believe there is a reason, and here’s why. Those other great books are about what goes on in a crisis. This book is what you do in a human impact crisis on a college campus. It is further very specific in the kind of crisis with which it deals. Unlike the Zdziarski and associates (2007) book, which covers a wide variety of kinds of crises, this book deals with what to do with human beings who are the causative agents and victims of a crisis. As such, this book is tasked with trying to make predictable what is often unpredictable and chaotic and with giving form and substance to that which is often as concrete and tangible as fog to the emotive, cognitive, and behavioral responses of college students (and maybe some professors and administrators as well) who are attempting to negotiate a crisis caused by either themselves or others. It also attempts to deal with the fog that can surround and engulf the system when it attempts to deal with a crisis. To that end, it indeed is not a book about lockstep fire drill plans.

It would be nice if humans behaved like Skinner’s rats and pigeons and lived on nice linear reinforcement schedules. It would certainly make planning for crises a whole lot easier. The problem is that they don’t, and it is perhaps an understatement to say that college students really don’t. It is also concerned with how the systems respond, sometimes in a not-so-linear manner. Therefore, this book is about giving you some very hands-on examples of what to do with students who are potentially violent toward themselves or others and how the system might respond to those problems. It doesn’t give you an example of every type of violent situation you may encounter. Please don’t be put out if the particular crisis you are grappling with is not covered. What we are attempting to do is give you the general tactics and strategies, along with some specific prevention, intervention, and postvention logistics and techniques that will allow you to apply them to almost any human-made crisis you are likely to be confronted with on a college campus.

We have divided this book into two parts. The first part deals with the system. The second part deals specifically with individuals. Following are brief descriptions of what the specific chapters are about.

Chapter 2, Boilerplate: The Basics of Crisis Intervention. This chapter covers the definitions, types, and dynamics of crisis. We discuss the basic building blocks of theory and terminology a person needs to know to talk about and understand the field of crisis and crisis intervention. A good deal of ink and paper in this chapter is devoted to multicultural issues and how they may affect crises on college campuses.

Chapter 3, Herding Cats: Organizing a Crisis Response. Who does what and when, and how do they do it? Boundary problems, ethical and legal issues, sharing of responsibility, and other critical issues in administration of a comprehensive crisis intervention plan are covered.

Chapter 4, Duller Than Dirt … More Valuable Than Gold: Policies and Procedures. This chapter examines setting up policies and procedures governing how crises will be handled. Critical issues such as information sharing, retrieval, and storage are covered. Notification, privacy, and other legal and ethical issues that evolve from a crisis are examined.

Chapter 5, The Best of Times and the Worst of Times: The Tale of Two Laws. Two tragedies on college campuses have changed the landscape of confidentiality. The death of Tatiana Tarasoff at the hands of Prosenjit Poddar in 1969 affected the way mental health professionals manage clients who are homicidal. The Virginia Tech shooting spree by Seung-Hui Cho on April 16, 2007, may have even a larger impact on the way universities address the issue of students who may become violent. This chapter discusses these cases and their influence on crisis management and intervention.

Chapter 6, Reality Check: Entry into the System. This chapter is a discussion of difficulties in entry into and training issues in changing an entrenched system that has many constituencies that may pay lip service but resist the complexities inherent in a comprehensive crisis intervention program. How buy-in is created, who is responsible, and how they are trained to deal with a campus crisis are detailed.

Chapter 7, What You See Is What You Get … or Maybe Not: Assessment of the System. In crisis intervention, assessment of the system is as important as individual assessment of persons in crisis. Continuous assessment from precrisis to postcrisis functioning in the system is critical for understanding and ameliorating the crisis. This chapter examines how and why organizational triage assessment for crisis occurs and what can be learned from it.

Chapter 8, No Rest for the Weary: System Recovery After a Crisis. This chapter addresses components of what the system does in the traumatic wake of human crises, including memorial, political, and legal issues. We consider the potential emergence of acute stress disorder in the system, and contextual modeling in understanding the impact of what happened through use of an eight step intervention model.

Chapter 9, Not Buying a Pig in a Poke. This chapter covers basic understanding and use of the Triage Assessment Scale for Students in Learning Environments (TASSLE) across affective, behavioral, and cognitive components of a crisis, as well as use of a threat assessment team to determine potential lethality.

Chapter 10, Basic Training. This chapter explains and illustrates the basic listening and responding skills an average person needs to know and be able to use during a crisis.

Chapter 11, One Day at a Time: Survivorship in the Aftermath. This chapter discusses individual needs and system support responses to the individual and the role of mourning, stages of grief, Critical Incidents Stress Debriefing, and psychological autopsy of the individual in helping survivors deal with the traumatic wake.

Chapter 12, Leadership Checklist: Preparing Your Campus for Crisis. This chapter details a checklist summary of the things you need to do to get your crisis prevention and intervention plan for human dilemmas up and running.

If those topics fit into your game plan about what you need to do in crisis containment, then you are in the right place. Before we go any further, though, we want to give you a brief history of crisis intervention in general and at college campuses in particular. We do this because we are great believers in the admonishment that those who don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it. In other words, if you don’t know where you have been, then how in the world do you know where you are or where you are going?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CRISIS INTERVENTION

Depending on your view of the origin of our species, crisis has been around for humans since Eve got interested in a fruit tree or a herd of woolly mammoths stampeded through an Ice Age Cro-Magnon camp. However, for most people, the concept of crisis and crisis intervention comes to the fore only when large-scale natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, affect huge parts of the ecosystem and large segments of the population. Historically, crisis intervention is most commonly seen as piling up sandbags on flooding rivers or searching debris for survivors after a tornado or earthquake. Crisis intervention in the form of direct support to humans has been stereotypically seen as disaster relief by such organizations as the Red Cross or Salvation Army providing tents and serving food. Currently, the most discussed and cussed agency identified with disasters and trauma is probably the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

As we have moved into the 21st century, the view of crisis intervention as sandbags and soup kitchens has changed as terror acts such as the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, and secondary school shootings such as Columbine have been brought to us in living horror in real time by new video technology. Although the Red Cross and the Salvation Army have been involved in disaster relief for more than a hundred years, FEMA has been in existence for only about 30 years. Furthermore, not until the last two decades or so has any organization given much time or thought to the mental health aspect of broadband crisis intervention for large populations afflicted by traumatic events. That unsettling fact has been particularly so in regard to colleges, where wide-scale violence and crisis were not perceived as part of that bucolic, ivory tower atmosphere. To say that environment has now changed would be a bit more than an understatement.

Suicide Intervention

Because of its high incidence in the typical college age group, suicide is certainly part of our focus in this book. Suicide prevention is probably the oldest organized crisis intervention program, starting with the National Save-a-Life League phone line in 1906 (Bloom, 1984). There are now hundreds of crisis suicide hotlines, including the national suicide prevention lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Edwin Shneidman (2001) is known as the father of modern suicidology, and his landmark research on suicide has spanned more than six decades of work in trying to figure out why people kill themselves. Suicide is probably one of the most thoroughly researched mental health issues in the world. Clearly, suicide, along with drug addiction, has large implications for college-age populations who are at risk for both, as well as the potential for violence that goes with them (Meilman, Lewis, & Gerstein, 2006; Nicoletti et al., 2001; Silverman, 2006).

Cocoanut Grove Survivors

However, the real benchmark and foundation blocks for the birth of crisis intervention came with the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in 1942, when more than 400 people perished. Eric Lindemann (1944), who treated many of the survivors, found that they seemed to have common emotional responses and need for psychological assistance and support. Out of Lindemann’s work came the first notions of what may be called “normal” grief reactions to a disaster. Gerald Caplan (1961) was also involved in working with Cocoanut Grove survivors. His experience led to some of the very first theoretical attempts to explain what a crisis is and the first basic rudiments of crisis intervention with traumatized individuals (Caplan, 1964).

Social Movements

To really understand the evolution of crisis intervention, though, is to understand that several social movements have been critical to its development and that these did not start fully formed as crisis intervention groups by any means. Three of the major groups that have helped shape crisis intervention into an emerging specialty have been Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) members, Vietnam veterans, and participants in the women’s movement in the 1970s. AA worked long and hard to make alcoholism become recognizable as a disease rather than a character deficit. The veterans pushed the government and the medical establishment to recognize that veterans contracted something more than combat fatigue in Vietnam. The National Organization of Women (NOW) opened the drapes on domestic violence and lobbied state and federal legislatures and authorities to construct laws and prosecute offenders of physical and sexual assault against women and children. Although their commissioned intentions and objectives had little to do with the advancement of crisis intervention as a clinical specialty, these groups had a lot to do with people who were desperate for help and weren’t getting any. The groups all started as grassroots movements and, through continuous self-organizing efforts, became political forces that local, state, and federal governments couldn’t ignore (James, 2008, pp. 7–9).

As a result, governments and institutions were forced into acting because of intense political pressure from these social interest groups turned political action groups. A classic example of unwillingness to acknowledge an emerging mental health issue was the entrenched and regressive policies of the 1960s and early 1970s Veterans Administration (VA) toward returning Vietnam veterans. It was the intense political pressure that was brought to bear on the VA to deal with the thousands of Vietnam veterans who were returning home with terrifying behaviors, disturbing personality changes, and severe cognitive disturbances that forced them to act years after these behavioral anomalies first came to their attention (MacPherson, 1984); later, such problems came to be known as post-traumatic stress disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 1980). Because of the continuous publicity and lobbying efforts of AA, NOW, and the Vietnam veterans’ organizations, the medical establishment, insurance companies, the government, and finally society in general were forced to recognize these as legitimate and widespread social issues that could give birth to identifiable mental disorders. These bureaucracies grudgingly started to provide resources and treatment for these maladies and the resulting human crises these disorders created. As you shall soon see, university systems have not exactly been paragons of leadership in recognizing and dealing with their own human crises and their traumatic wakes either.

HISTORY OF CRISIS ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES

There was a fairly long history of horrific mass murders on college campuses prior to Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. The classic example is Charles Whitman, who in 1966 used the 307-foot Texas Tower as an almost impregnable sniper position at the University of Texas in Austin to kill 14 people and wound dozens of others before he died. There were two rather ominous outcomes of that murderous rampage. The first was news coverage (radio) on-site in real time. This was one of the first times that an ongoing shooting rampage received real-time media coverage. What we now take for granted in regard to real-time news coverage was extraordinary in 1966 and certainly set the stage for some of the traumatic ramifications that media coverage of violence and disaster has for us today. Second, it most likely resulted in the creation of the country’s first SWAT teams because an outgunned Austin police department had to rely on citizens bringing their high-powered hunting rifles to the scene of what became a war zone.

Richard Speck’s 1966 mass murder of student nurses in Chicago, Ted Bun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1: … Or a Tornado or Earthquake Drill
• 2: Boilerplate: The Basics of Crisis Intervention
• 3: Herding Cats: Organizing a Crisis Response
• 4: Duller Than Dirt … More Valuable Than Gold: Policies and Procedures
• 5: The Best of Times and the Worst of Times: The Tale of Two Laws
• 6: Reality Check: Entry into the System
• 7: What You See Is What You Get … or Maybe Not: Assessment of the System
• 8: No Rest for the Weary: System Recovery After a Crisis
• 9: Not Buying a Pig in a Poke
• 10: Basic Training
• 11: One Day at a Time: Survivorship in the Aftermath
• 12: Leadership Checklist: Preparing Your Campus for Crisis
• Author Index
• Subject Index