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    Crisis De-escalation: A Mental Health Professional's Guide for Anyone Managing Conflict
    Crisis De-escalation: A Mental Health Professional's Guide for Anyone Managing Conflict
    Crisis De-escalation: A Mental Health Professional's Guide for Anyone Managing Conflict
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    Crisis De-escalation: A Mental Health Professional's Guide for Anyone Managing Conflict

    By Mark Schorr

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    About this ebook

    This book evolved out of 15 years of doing trainings for individuals struggling with out-of-control people. I worked for decades in community behavioral healthcare, and was certified in two different systems for managing acting out behavior that could range from mild verbal aggression to physical assault. Over the years, I dug down deeper into the research, and also gathered on the experience and expertise of the many dedicated people I worked with. This book is meant to be helpful for anyone ranging from a flight attendant trying to artfully manage an intoxicated passenger, to a librarian struggling with a mentally ill person seeking shelter in the stacks, to a healthcare worker with a disgruntled and disoriented patient. The goal is staying as calm as possible (of course easier said than done) and emerging with a feeling of a win/win situation. Seldom easy, and sometimes not possible, but for an individual who masters the presented skills, they can know they used evidence-based practices to make the best of a bad situation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMark Schorr
    Release dateAug 17, 2014
    ISBN9781310013485
    Crisis De-escalation: A Mental Health Professional's Guide for Anyone Managing Conflict
    Author

    Mark Schorr

    Born and raised in New York, Mark has also lived in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Portland, Oregon. He's worked as a bookstore manager, private investigator, nightclub bouncer, newspaper reporter, freelance writer, and is currently a licensed psychotherapist. He is highly regarded throughout the Northwest region for his trainings on writing, mental health and crisis de-escalation. He has also presented in New York, Beijing, and California.

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      Book preview

      Crisis De-escalation - Mark Schorr

      Crisis De-Escalation:

      A Mental Health Professional’s Guide for Anyone Managing Conflict

      By Mark Schorr

      Nationally Certified Counselor

      Copyright Mark Schorr ©2021

      Second edition

      All rights reserved. Written permission is required to reproduce or distribute all or part of the material that follows.

      Contact: schorrpdx@gmail.com

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Causes of Escalation

      Proxemics: Keeping Your Distance

      Body Language and Facial Expression

      The Power of Validation

      Putting It All Together

      Aftermath

      Introduction

      In tens of thousands of therapists’ offices, between diplomas and certificates mounted on the wall, there are two framed Chinese characters: danger and opportunity. Together, they mean crisis. Counselors explain to curious clients that when you have a crisis, you have an opportunity as well as danger.

      This book is to help those, usually not in the quiet of a counselor’s office, trying to deal with individuals in a crisis. I hope to assist security guards and librarians, crisis workers and shopkeepers, bartenders, hospital workers, waiters and waitresses, clergy, caretakers, and schoolteachers. While there will be talk about diagnosable mental illness, the principles work equally well with cranky family members, irate customers, or difficult neighbors.

      The goal is to keep the need for police response minimal, the decibels down, and enhance your confidence if the crisis worsens. Many police departments are polishing their crisis de-escalation skills. As resources for people with mental illness have dwindled, police have become all too often the primary psychiatric first responders. And sending officers who are far better trained with force than de-escalation has often had the tragic outcome one would expect. The statistics are grim, with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill noting that people with mental illness are 16 times more likely to get killed by police.

      For more than two decades I worked in challenging mental health and addictions settings as a licensed professional counselor and a certified addictions counselor. Clients had mental illness, substance-abuse problems, and sometimes psychosis. Many had criminal justice involvement or were homeless. The majority were trauma survivors. I rose from being a staff member on the crisis team to trauma therapist, to director of staff development, which included training responsibilities for more than 1300 employees in three counties and led to developing the team that responded to workplace crises.

      I was certified in two de-escalation approaches to help staff better manage hard-to-control clients. Then the agency was asked to provide similar trainings for community constituents. The library struggled with a large number of struggling individuals, and librarians no longer could whisper shhhh and have their domain restored to silence. I began providing trainings that helped workers manage escalated patrons/citizens/customers/clients. The Department of Motor Vehicle was another site of tense confrontations. Big surprise, right? The Oregon Bar Association, downtown churches, various county agencies, all became customers for trainings. The City of Portland Bureau of Emergency Management brought me in to train volunteers coping with agitated citizens. I have worked with correction officers, homeless shelters, an art museum and a state hospital, as well varied outpatient, residential, and secure residential settings.

      Prior to my mental health career, jobs included being the manager of a bookstore in a tough neighborhood, being a nightclub bouncer, and working on a crisis line. To write this book, I drew on my own experiences as well as research from psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists and even zoologists. In the first chapter, there’s background and information about causes. In the second half we will jump into specific factors, skills and strategies to directly address the problems.

      It is easy to view the aggressive person as a villain, and important not to. Most of us, or dare I say all of us, have had times when we have been not our best selves, and been louder, pushier, more aggressive than we should be. Particularly those of us who are ex-New Yorkers. An awareness that you may be seeing a snapshot of someone at their worst, and you don’t want to make the situation even worse, can be helpful at tapping into your own compassion.

      There is an alphabet soup of systems taught to help people manage volatile situations: Pro-ACT(formerly PART), CPI (Crisis Prevention Institute), PMAB, MABPRO, NAPPI, SCIP, TIPS, Handle with Care, OIS, MOAB, Secure, TEAM, TSI (Therapeutic Strategies and Intervention). Wherever you see an A & B, it’s usually Assaultive Behavior. And I is for intervention. There is much overlapping common wisdom, with the differences usually coming from setting (e.g., is it a hospital or jail with a trained security team able to use heavy duty force, or

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