Israeli "Mental First-Aid" Method Offered to Attack Victims

(AFP) Jonah Mandel - Moshe Farchi, head of Stress, Trauma and Resilience Studies at Israel's Tel-Hai College, developed an unorthodox model for treating mental trauma and preventing post-traumatic stress disorder during his years as a mental health officer in the military, and is now sharing it with first responders in other countries. His principles are simple, easily applicable and, to the layman, possibly counterintuitive. "One thinks that a person in distress should be contained, held." But thinking and making decisions are what the person needs to do in order to be freed of a "sense of helplessness." "We can't stop the threat - the rocket has hit, the event has taken place. What we can do is stop the helplessness. The opposite of helplessness is effective action. That's why first of all we need to activate the person, to diminish the helplessness." Activating the person includes asking concrete and factual questions, giving him or her the ability to make decisions. "The two main goals are to quickly return a person to being functional in a way that would reduce the risk of getting killed, and reducing the risk for more serious disorders" in the future, such as PTSD, said Lt.-Col. Dr. Ariel Ben Yehuda, the psychiatrist who currently heads the clinical branch in the Israeli army's mental health department. People in life-threatening situations tend to feel confused, lonely, frozen or disoriented, said Ben Yehuda. "Farchi's method addresses these issues. This isn't psychiatric treatment, rather something very focused. You can do it in two minutes, but the idea is to 'reset' the person." A key aspect of Farchi's method is that it should not be reserved for professionals, but spread to as many people as possible. "The chance that a person (experiencing trauma) will be next to a professional is very small, but that a layman will be next to him is very high," Farchi said.


2017-07-20 00:00:00

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