Hi. Welcome back. In this video we will make a short introduction on what is critical incident stress management. This week we are talking on how to take care of ourselves, so it's important that we learn at least a bit the terminology and the most extended participants' self-care techniques. All these techniques would be under this name. But well, defusing protocols are important because they allow us to keep doing our work as participants. We have seen how as assistants we aren't immune in front of the misfortunes with which we must work. In fact there are studies which prove that in some collectives of, in example, firemen in USA have a really high post-traumatic stress rate, it goes to a 16-18% compared to the post-traumatic stress tax than in a normal population. Why? Well, usually because of this traumatic stress accumulation which is affecting our daily life. If on the other side we aren't professional but we work as volunteers in some organizations, we are also exposed to some kind of stress for which maybe we aren't so prepared. And the fact of later having to go back to our normal life, makes it a little harder and it might induce us to a symptomatology. This is why it's so important taking care of us. Inside what you have seen in the previous video we must do to take care of ourselves. And it is also important to detect when we are beginning to fail, or when we can't focus properly, when we are irritable, when we find hard to leave the scenario where we are working, when this feeling that we get angry with anyone, we are irritable, it looks like we are waiting for someone to tell us so that we can get angry or answer with rage. Well, all these small symptoms tell us that we might need some help, a small guide to keep doing our job. Inside of this defusing protocols huge umbrella there are many, there's the debriefing and the defusing,
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which are the most extended ones and the
ones we will see with more details in the next videos so that you can see how to apply them and you can learn how they work. But then there's another kind of sessions, in example there's a special session in case a colleague dies. It's quite usual depending on the kind of participant body that through the professional career a colleague dies. There's a specific session for these cases. Then we have another kind of sessions at a support level, as an adjustment in crisis assistance and then we also have participation sessions of a pre-crisis education, so that they give us certain knowledge on what will happen, what are we going to face, how are we going to face it. Preventive education would be a bit in the line of this kind of sessions. Why are they so important? Because although maybe we don't realize, our job can be influenced by it. We don't necessary have to develop post-traumatic stress as we were saying in the beginning, we don't have to get to the extreme of this high percentage. But we might end up burned out. In participants we have seen how through years we might develop exhaustion by compassion, which would be the burn out other professionals have, but in our case we would call this way the feeling that anything we do won't matter because it won't work, that sometimes there are participant bodies in more social fields saying they don't have enough resources, that no matter what they do, they're condemned, this expression that there won't be an escape no matter how good we do our work. Well, when we get to this point is when we need focusing back a bit, taking care of ourselves and refocusing what we are doing. There is another kind of reactions, however, which is the opposite of it called Superman's syndrome. It's when we become unbeatable, we have the feeling that we can do anything, we even take some risks which we wouldn't assume in another situation, such as doing some delicate maneuvers or assuming certain risks such as assisting someone without gloves, doing certain tasks forgetting about our own safety. Taking too many work hours because I can. So all these things are also telling us we need to rest a bit, focus and take care of ourselves. So the important thing is that we have clear that there's a toolbox full of tools we can use to ventilate emotions, to manage a traumatic event, to share and learn about the reactions we have in front of a traumatic success and about our experiences in it and that all this kind of tools are volunteer, they are usually provided by the centers we work in and also it makes us feel safe and supported by these institutions, our bond with them increases, somehow they take care of us and they ease or give us the chance to take care of ourselves, to take self-care. And finally it's important to remember it's not a psychotherapy, it's not a therapeutic session with a psychologist. Although it's true that it's recommendable that most of these sessions are guided by a trained professional, they aren't psychotherapies, we aren't in that part of the process, they are all preventive character techniques. What do studies tell us about the real preventive character these techniques have? Well, there are many studies which tell us it's not effective, that techniques such as debriefing and defusing aren't effective. But it's true that these studios, in some revisions made by Mitchell who is one of the authors of this kind of techniques, that it's true that these studies aren't as strict as they should, in the sense that the techniques aren't applied by a trained professional, groups aren't homogeneous. It's very important as you will see in the next videos in this kind of techniques that people that form the group to which we apply the technique are small and homogeneous, with all their members having lived the same situation or having the same affectation level. So these studies we see that don't show effectiveness, prove that actually the technique isn't effective if we don't apply it properly. Instead there's a lot more studies in which effectiveness does have a variation range but there is an effective technique.