Emotions are what move us to action. Almost always they have
to do with people and what we want from or did not obtain from people. We may
get angry at someone because of something he has done or failed to do. We may
feel shame in connection with some person because of what we ourselves did or
thought.
There is only a
handful of specific emotions: fear, shame, anger, guilt, sadness, joy, sexual
desire, grief." Going on to explain how he tries to help, the psychiatrist
tells us: "I am interested in what the client is experiencing when he is
with me, and I may put it to him just like that: 'I'm curious about what you
are experiencing right now.' Then I see how well he is able to discern his own
feelings. Most of us have not been taught this skill.
We have learned how to
keep our emotions vague. We have learned all the imprecise words for feelings:
tense, nervous, upset, disturbed, bad, frustrated, bothered, agitated,
aggravated, overwrought, tired, and lousy, depressed, and so on. "Either
the client's present emotions are giving him distress, or the automatic
constraint (repression) of these emotions is producing distress of a second
order. There is a reduction in distress from both sources when he can
acknowledge the constraining actions and put the emotions into thoughts and
words.
This starts a benign circle-thought, verbalization, sharing,
new perceptions, augmented coping resources-e-replacing the vicious circle of
increasing tension and further demoralization." Crisis intervention today
is being practiced at most general hospital- that has psychiatric units. It is
available through many private psych: artists. There are storefront clinics in
many areas, an increasing number of them. Some indication of the value of
crisis intervention is to be found ill the experience of Los Angeles County
Hospital, which used to admit 95 percent of patients coming in or brought in
for emotional disturbances, better than 1,500 a month, and had to send many to
mentalinstitutions.
Now, employing crisis intervention, the hospital help'; 65
percent as outpatients, and the 35 percent admitted stay an average of 5.2 days
instead of 180 days as before; very few go to mental institutions.
There is also the experience of San Francisco where the
annual commitment rate to state mental institutions dropped from 2,887 to 119
in the first four years in which the city had an expanding complex of emergency
treatment centers.
Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta now treats 5,000
psychiatric emergencies a year in its crisis center; and
its 36-bed mental ward, previously inadequate to meet the need, is seldom
completely occupied today. Crisis centers are staffed by teams which include
nurses, social workers, lay therapists, and clergymen as well as professional
psychiatrists. Certainly, crisis intervention is no panacea for all mental illness".It
could be important in your life or the life of someone close to you to be aware
of the availability of crisis intervention and of the likelihood that it can
help in seemingly desperate situations.
