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Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM): A Statistical Review of the Literature

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Abstract

Crisis intervention has emerged over the last 50 years as a proven method for the provision of urgent psychological support in the wake of a critical incident or traumatic event. The history of crisis intervention is replete with singular, time-limited interventions. As crisis intervention has evolved, more sophisticated multicomponent crisis intervention systems have emerged. As they have appeared in the extant empirically-based literature, their results have proven promising. A previously published paper narratively reviewed the Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) model of multicomponent crisis intervention. The purpose of this paper was to offer a statistical review of CISM as an integrated multicomponent crisis intervention system. Using the methodology of meta-analysis, a review of eight CISM investigations revealed a Cohen's d of 3.11. A fail-safe number of 792 was similarly obtained.

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Everly, G.S., Flannery, R.B. & Eyler, V.A. Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM): A Statistical Review of the Literature. Psychiatr Q 73, 171–182 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016068003615

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