Our actual intervention is, surprisingly enough, the least complicated part of the intervention process, but it requires the most skill.  Once we develop our intervention hypothesis, our actual intervention only involves following through with that hypothesis.

Some further comments related to intervention hypotheses may be helpful.  Fundamentally, our intervention hypothesis in any given crisis can focus in only a few areas.  As we discussed, we can focus on the individual and attempt to get him to calm down, slow down, and plan ahead.  As varied as crisis situations are, this focus on the individual is by far the most common need in crisis intervention.  Later we will discuss crisis communication as a way of responding to this kind of individual need.  In addition to individual focus, our intervention hypothesis could relate to environmental modification or an attempt to change something or someone in the individual’s total situation.  In some crises, we may want to focus our intervention hypothesis on the interaction between the individual and his total situation.  At other times, we may want to direct our intervention hypothesis specifically toward reducing the now potential of the crisis.  If a man tells you that he is going to kill himself, one of your first questions should relate to how he proposes to accomplish that.  If he tells you that he is going to shoot himself with a gun that is lying on the table between the two of you, the now potential will be substantially reduced if you take the gun or at least make it inoperative.  If a mother tells you she is afraid that she is going to injure one of her children severely, it would be wise to get someone else to watch the children for a while.  What can you do or what can you get the individual to do, either to lower the now potential or to increase the self-resolution factor?  Your answer to that question in any specific situation is your intervention hypothesis.

Throughout our discussion of crisis intervention, we have considered numerous examples of crisis situations and of people in crisis.  Generally, intervention has been in terms of talking, thinking, responding to feeling, and helping the individual evaluate alternative plans of action.  Intervention has been primarily a verbal, feeling process.  There are however, many crisis situations in which we should try to either get the individual to do something specific or do it ourselves.  The example about the man who is going to shoot himself can serve to stimulate our thinking.  If someone tells us that he is thinking about killing himself, we should always try to find out how he proposes to do that.  If we are talking with someone on the hot line and he tells us that he is going to overdose with a bottle of tranquilizers he has in his bathroom, we will talk with him to try to get him to externalize and focus his anger.  At some point in our conversation, we will hopefully get him to agree not to kill himself.  If it is at all possible, we should get him to flush the tranquilizers down the toilet.  If possible, we want him to lay the telephone receiver down, go flush the medication, and come back to the telephone to tell us that he has done it.  Someone who is considering suicide in a serious way usually has a good idea about how he will do it.  If the person no longer has the bottle of tranquilizers, he will at least have to think up a new way of killing himself if he again becomes acutely depressed after talking with us on the telephone. …

Please press play to continue.