By Jeanne Brooks

This manual is meant to help prepare your agency to perform some of the most challenging work: helping people through crisis. Dr. Brooks has worked in the mental health field for over thirty years with a specialty in crisis, and for the last ten years, she has been training counseling students in crisis intervention. Natural disasters, mass shootings, refugee crises, human sex trafficking, etc. show the growing need for individuals to be prepared to sit with others in their suffering. The need is growing, yet the workers are few. Dr. Brooks has recognized that more and more organizations, disciplines, and ministries are doing crisis intervention with little to no knowledge or understanding of the effects that working with people in crisis has on the crisis worker. This manual will help you gain a better understanding of how trauma effects an individual, as well as how working with people in crisis can affect the interventionist. This information can help you work more effectively by training you and your team members in self-sustainment. This Christian perspective of intervention will help you and your agency become more Christ-like in your approach by instilling a confidence and hope in the most horrific of circumstances, while still maintaining your strong faith in the goodness of God. The preventative practices provided in this manual will help prevent burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma for crisis interventionist.