Psychological debriefing is a brief intervention that takes place in the first few days after a traumatic event. This event can be a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or flood, or accidents, whether traffic, air or rail.
During a debriefing, colleagues who have lived something together or even strangers who have experienced a similar situation form a group coordinated by a professional. The goal is to create an intergroup support space for people who live or have experienced similar things.
- This space functions as a place to express yourself safely.
- To expose all those feelings.
- Thoughts and reactions that have arisen with the event.
- This helps prevent future mental disorders by the importance of what happened in each person’s life.
These people then come together to alleviate the accumulated emotional burden behind the experience. The psychologist-led encounter seeks to verbalize the experience, a difficult time for those going through traumatic events.
Therefore, debriefing is a technique designed to close and integrate potentially traumatic events, introducing emotional learning opportunities and emotional management techniques, this tool is considered to be of great help to prevent the increase of symptoms also among professionals facing emergencies.
Emergency professionals are also human, they also get sick, they suffer and sometimes they need help, often they end up being forgotten. These professionals are at high risk of psychological damage related to their work, so it is of paramount importance that they receive immediate assistance in high-impact situations, if only for preventive purposes.
They usually take jobs that do not take into account their age, education, skills and previous experience, which can cause the symptoms of stress to become more acute, in other cases, it is the professional himself who is unable to recognize that the situation is more demanding. of what he can give.
Disaster response doesn’t have time to happen or end after it’s happened. Professional requests come in a variety of forms and emergencies, in teams that are also established without prior planning or preparation.
Professionals must have several resources to be used at the moment, in the face of seriousness seemingly ineffective proposals may appear, but this is normal if you understand the size and characteristics of the situation that we are going through, in addition professionals must be prepared to face the situation. This.
The symptoms that lifeguards may feel when attending after a sinister are very varied, physiologically the technician who develops his function and is under a lot of pressure can present fatigue, nausea, chills, shortness of breath, etc. ?Symptoms of anxiety and exhaustion.
The cognitive level of the professional should always be very alert and vigilant, but he will have negative thoughts that he must know how to stop, after all, his emotional response will be like that of others: fear, anxiety, irritation and even emotional shock. .
In the motor context, a very common feature is the inability to rest, fast speech and the use of screams during conversations. To prevent these symptoms from getting worse, debriefing is certainly an exceptional tool.
The effects of stress on lifeguards can cause a lot of harm to the person. Let’s look at some of these effects:
? In the workplace
? In the family environment:
Attendance to lifeguards does not stop at their ground intervention, must continue once the shift or proposal is finished, it is an issue that should be explicit in the organization of the work, a kind of maintenance task to avoid wear and tear accumulates in the most important parts of the equipment, ensuring that everything works. These pieces are just people.
This technique of group support or emotional reception meetings already has many adherents, many organizations use this procedure in its original version or adapted to help people manage their emotions after working on natural disasters.
These meetings are governed by a set of rules and are chaired by an expert, during which the participants relate in their different vision the objective events and the subjective, cognitive and emotional reactions that the events imply for each one.
Once the job is completed, the shift or rescue or rescue is completed, there should still be a final working group meeting where participants can:
The debriefing process is not an improvisation, but a structured meeting that goes through the following phases:
After interrogation, when everything “returns to normal”, rescuers may continue to present some symptoms, such as rejection of rest, self-criticism of their performance, feeling incomprehension in their closest or known relationships, etc.
As we have seen, the stress that can be generated in the face of an emergency or disaster response can reach very high levels and is difficult to manage, debriefing is performed between the first 24 to 72 hours after the critical incident.
Due to the need for debriefing, the goal is to put words about suffering, structure events and relieve the stress that participants cause through experience, this is done in a planned and structured way by specialists in the subject.
It is about learning to understand and manage the normal reactions that result from a difficult traumatic event, in a space where people feel finally safe, accompanied and guided therapeutically in the process of integration and solving their problems.