About
This is an elective, issue-oriented course at the undergraduate level offered as part of the Certificate in Case Management. This course focuses on the increasing number of complex and painful personal, couple and family crisis situations encountered by professional social workers in the course of service delivery. Crisis events are characterized by high stress responses in one or more persons within a short period of time, usually in response to some difficult social, interpersonal, intrapsychic, medical or developmental triggering events. In some instances, stressful forces may have been present over a substantial period of time and an overt crisis has suddenly been triggered by some precipitating event (i.e., a lengthy distressed marriage that ends destructively and suddenly after the children are grown). In other instances, a crisis may be unexpectedly precipitated in the ordinary life of an individual, couple or family by an intense life stressing and/or threatening event such as a death of a loved one or catastrophic event.
Students will learn the various theories and practice approaches that inform practice in crisis situations. Attention will be given to budget cuts of programs and staffing of social agencies with the resultant contraction in resources available to professionals. Since many forms of social stress are becoming increasingly compelling among the poor, ethnic, racial minorities, and gay and lesbian people the course will focus on the required competency to quickly establish an effective helping relationship and meaningful communication across these groups. Similarly, the course will address the new evolving roles of women and men in modern society and its implications intervening in crisis situations, current trends, and cultural forces. This course encourages students to use the classroom process and written assignments in conjunction with the assigned readings to develop a working, professional helping approach selected from the available theoretical formulations about crisis and therapeutic crisis intervention which appear most appropriate for their practice. Based on the nature of the crisis, the kind of agency setting, the program within which they function, and the characteristics of their "professional style" in crisis intervention.
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