B.U. Bridge is published by the Boston University Office of University Relations.

Contact Us

Staff

Emotional first aid
Healing the horror in a campus crisis

By Hope Green

Think of posttraumatic stress disorder, and images of shell-shocked war veterans trembling in the night may spring to mind. But the syndrome turns up in civilian life, too. Anywhere that horrific events occur, witnesses can be anguished long after the ambulances speed away and the police tape is torn from the scene.

College administrators are paying increasing attention to the way tragic incidents on campus affect their students, faculty, and staff. They worry about the psychic toll on survivors of events like the Seton Hall University fire last January, which killed 3 students, the fall 1999 bonfire collapse at Texas A&M University, where 12 died, and recent suicides at Harvard and MIT.

Leah Fygetakis, director of the Counseling Center, is considering training more of the campus community in crisis intervention. Photo by Vernon Doucette

Just before Thanksgiving, 30 BU staff members attended a two-day workshop designed to enhance their preparedness to aid students and peers in the aftermath of a tragedy. The workshop provided an introduction to a United Nations-approved model known as critical incident stress management (CISM).

Participants were drawn from more than a dozen departments, including Marsh Chapel, the University Resource Center, the Office of Residence Life, and the Student Activities Office. The trainees are now certified to assist at any emergency, on- or off-campus, if there is a call for CISM volunteers.

CISM does not replace professional therapy, which many people may need as they recover from a crisis. Rather, it is a type of emotional first aid administered in the earliest moments, hours, and days after an event.

"The whole point is to intervene quickly in a way that will accelerate the natural healing process, and short-circuit someone's trauma from developing into a posttraumatic stress disorder," says Leah Fygetakis, director of the University's Counseling Center.

Fygetakis and Herbert Ross, associate vice president and dean of students, invited a consultant from the On-Site Academy, a residential treatment program in Gardner, Mass., to teach the method at BU after attending his workshop at Northeastern University last year. The academy treats emergency workers, diplomats, and others who have been traumatized by repeated exposure to carnage and grief in the line of duty.

"This workshop was not designed to make people counselors or therapists," Ross says. "It was designed to bring some additional skills to our already well-prepared crisis response team at BU. We're trying to take what we have and make it better."

Over the years, Fygetakis has helped students deal with the aftershock of several tragic events - among them, a 1991 hit-and-run accident on Commonwealth Avenue that killed two students, the rape of a Loretto Hall freshman in September 1999, and several years ago, an attempted suicide involving a student who shot himself, then walked down eight flights of stairs before he collapsed in a bustling dormitory lobby.

The Counseling Center already has a crisis intervention counselor on staff, Maureen Mahoney, and has established protocols for other staff members to visit residence halls and classrooms as needed. What appeals to Fygetakis about CISM, however, is that it can be taught to laypeople in a range of student-services departments, thus widening the circle of potential first-responders.

According to lead trainer Hayden Duggan, the intervention method is based on three principles of combat stress management developed in World War II.

"The first principle is immediacy," Duggan says. "We look at a psychological wound from a critical incident very much like a physical wound: you need to clean it out, dress it, and treat it. If you just let it sit there and fester, it's likely to get infected.

"The second principle is proximity. It's good to have these services delivered close in space and time to the event. The third principle is duty-expected attitude: you're eventually going back on the job because there's nothing wrong with you - you're just having a normal reaction to abnormal events."

Although CISM was originally developed to treat emergency workers for stress, Duggan says, the principles can be applied to assist anyone who is involved in a disaster.

At BU, participants in his workshop viewed and discussed videos of well-publicized incidents. They learned how to assess a crisis scene and develop a plan of action as a team. And simulating the conversations that might occur during a fire, they learned specific techniques for encouraging evacuees to articulate their feelings.

Participants say the two-day experience was intense at times, but potentially very useful. "The presenters didn't talk over my head, and I don't think they talked beneath the Ph.D.s in the room," says Annmarie Kougias, director of the George Sherman Union. "And looking back at some of the emergencies we have dealt with in past years, this training affirmed that we did a lot of things right."

Ross and Fygetakis are considering a repeat of the CISM training. If you are interested, or have participated in the program elsewhere, contact Fygetakis at 353-3540.

8 December 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations