Basic Peer Support and Assisting Individuals in Crisis (ICISF) (3-days)

Course Description: Day 1 will discuss the basic functions of a peer support team of a public safety agency.  It will discuss policies and management of an effective peer support team.  Day 2 & 3 will cover the Assisting Individuals in Crisis ICISF course.  Crisis Intervention is NOT psychotherapy; rather, it is a specialized acute emergency mental health intervention that requires specialized training. As physical first aid is to surgery, crisis intervention is to psychotherapy. Thus, crisis intervention is sometimes called “emotional first aid”. This program is designed to teach participants the fundamentals of, and a specific protocol for, individual crisis intervention. This course is designed for anyone who desires to increase their knowledge of individual (one-on-one) crisis intervention techniques in the fields of Business & Industry, Crisis Intervention, Disaster Response, Education, Emergency Services, Employee Assistance, Healthcare, Homeland Security, Mental Health, Military, Spiritual Care, and Traumatic Stress.

Program Highlights:

• Basic Psychology of the first responder
• The need for peer support and peer support functions.
• How to manage a peer support team.
• Psychological crisis and psychological crisis intervention
• Resistance, resiliency, recovery continuum
• Critical incident stress management
• Evidence-based practice
• Basic crisis communication techniques
• Common psychological and behavioral crisis reactions
• Putative and empirically-derived mechanisms
• SAFER-Revised model
• Suicide intervention
• Risks of iatrogenic “harm”

Instructor - Jeremy Sprague, President of the Peer Support Foundation

• Learn more about Jeremy Sprague here.