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Preparing for the worst to provide the best response.

Article Excerpt
The events of September 11, 2001, were the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. At the time, CIGNA Behavioral Health (CBH) had 15 EAP clients based in the World Trade Center and many more in the surrounding area. Within 24 hours of the attack, more than 100 clients across the country requested CBH's crisis services. By the fourth week after the disaster, CBH had delivered more than double the number of debriefings it provides in the course of a typical year.

Headline-grabbing tragedies of this magnitude are, thankfully, rare. But traumatic events do happen every day. A traumatic event is an incident outside the range of usual human experience that has the potential to overwhelm a person's normal ability to cope with stress. Natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, fires, and tornadoes can strike a community with little or no warning. The American workplace has its share of critical incidents: violence (real or threatened), robbery, suicide or attempted suicide, sudden or unexpected death of a colleague, a hostage or siege situation, vehicle accidents, industrial accidents involving serious injuries or fatalities, and reactions to downsizing and outsourcing.

These traumatic events--along with situations that catch national and worldwide attention such as 9/11, school shootings, and increasingly deadly and fast-spreading infectious diseases (including severe acute respiratory...

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