Coping With Crisis

Why are some people happier than others? Through Sam, representing the average North American worker, we explore how one's life choices impact their happiness, and delve into the underlying reasons why. The average person's life is often filled with challenges, and with those come stress. How one deals with this stress has a profound impact on their happiness. Mental illness is having a negative impact on people's overall quality of life, including employees, families, employers, and on community safety. Many are asking, "Why does it appear as if more of my peers are experiencing negative mental health issues? Why is there no remedy offered? The Coping Crisis takes a journey through the eyes of Sam to explore mental health, stress, and the role of coping skills and how the lack of those skills impacts one's health. Sam's experiences help demonstrate how gaps in coping skills directly impact happiness, and show how one can improve their coping skills to improve their happiness and health.

This book examines new developments in the area of human competence and coping behavior. It sets forth a conceptual framework that considers the interplay between environmental contexts and personal resources and their impact on how indi viduals cope with life transitions and crises. The selections cover the tasks confronted in varied life crises and describe the coping strategies employed in managing them. The material identifies the long-term effects of such life events as divorce and bereave ment as well as the way in which these stressors can promote personal growth and maturity. The book contains a broad selec tion of recent literature on coping and adaptation, integrative commentaries that provide the background for each of the areas as well as conceptual linkages among them, and an introductory overview that presents a general perspective on human compe tence and coping. Illustrative case examples are included. The first part of the book is organized chronologically ac cording to developmental life transitions confronted by many people-from the childhood years through adolescence, career choice and parenthood, divorce and remarriage, middle age and retirement, and death and bereavement. The second part covers unusual life crises and other hazards that typically involve ex treme stress such as man-made and natural disasters and terrorism. The book highlights effective coping behavior among healthy individuals rather than psychological breakdown and psychiatric symptoms. The emphasis is on successful adaptation, the ability to cope with life transitions and crises, and the process by which such ix x PREFACf. ".

Psychological Crisis Intervention: The SAFER-R Model is designed to provide the reader with a simple set of guidelines for the provision of psychological first aid (PFA). The model of psychological first aid (PFA) for individuals presented in this volume is the SAFER-R model developed by the authors. Arguably it is the most widely used tactical model of crisis intervention in the world with roughly 1 million individuals trained in its operational and derivative guidelines. This model of PFA is not a therapy model nor a substitute for therapy. Rather it is designed to help crisis interventionists stabile and mitigate acute crisis reactions in individuals, as opposed to groups. Guidelines for triage and referrals are also provided. Before plunging into the step-by-step guidelines, a brief history and terminological framework is provided. Lastly, recommendations for addressing specific psychological challenges (suicidal ideation, resistance to seeking professional psychological support, and depression) are provided.

This book contributes to a better understanding of what makes people and communities resilient in the face of disasters, violence and terrorism. This resilience is understood as a resource that facilitates recovery, effective functioning and positive outcomes in the wake of major critical events that threaten the well-being of individuals, families, communities and nations. The chapters in this publication present complementary perspectives on resilience in a variety of socially adverse settings and how to assess resilience beyond the level of an individual. The contributing authors not only consider evidence of resilience in the aftermath of mass trauma, but uniquely explore it from a developmental perspective and expand the focus from individual resilience to the broader ecological levels of community and society. The book contains 11 chapters reflecting different aspects of resilience. Presentation of these different perspectives will be helpful to scholars and students of human behavior affected by life-threatening crises. Together, the chapters present up-to-date research that affirms human strength when confronted by the extreme experiences. The book also covers the broad landscape of current knowledge and research topics on resilience that are related to mass violence and terrorism, which is one of the growing concerns of the world today.

Why in the pre-industrial period were some settlements resilient and stable over the long term while other settlements were vulnerable to crisis? Indeed, what made certain human habitations more prone to decline or even total collapse, than others? All pre-industrial societies had to face certain challenges: exogenous environmental hazards such as earthquakes or plagues, economic or political hazards from ‘outside’ such as warfare or expropriation of property, or hazards of their own-making such as soil erosion or subsistence crises. How then can we explain why some societies were able to overcome or negate these problems, while other societies proved susceptible to failure, as settlements contracted, stagnated, were abandoned, or even disappeared entirely? This book has been stimulated by the questions and hypotheses put forward by a recent ‘disaster studies’ literature - in particular, by placing the intrinsic arrangement of societies at the forefront of the explanatory framework. Essentially it is suggested that the resilience or vulnerability of habitation has less to do with exogenous crises themselves, but on endogenous societal responses which dictate: (a) the extent of destruction caused by crises and the capacity for society to protect itself; and (b) the capacity to create a sufficient recovery. By empirically testing the explanatory framework on a number of societies between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century in England, the Low Countries, and Italy, it is ultimately argued in this book that rather than the protective functions of the state or the market, or the implementation of technological innovation or capital investment, the most resilient human habitations in the pre-industrial period were those than displayed an equitable distribution of property and a well-balanced distribution of power between social interest groups. Equitable distributions of power and property were the underlying conditions in pre-industrial societies that allowed 'favourable' institutions to emerge with high rates of participation down the social hierarchy, giving people the freedom and room to choose their own fate - not necessarily reliant on one coping strategy but with the capacity to combine many different ones in search of optimum resilience.

The financial crisis that erupted on Wall Street in 2008 quickly cascaded throughout much of the advanced industrial world. Facing the specter of another Great Depression, policymakers across the globe responded in sharply different ways to avert an economic collapse. Why did the response to the crisis—and its impact on individual countries—vary so greatly among interdependent economies? How did political factors like public opinion and domestic interest groups shape policymaking in this moment of economic distress? Coping with Crisis offers a rigorous analysis of the choices societies made as a devastating global economic crisis unfolded. With an ambitiously broad range of inquiry, Coping with Crisis examines the interaction between international and domestic politics to shed new light on the inner workings of democratic politics. The volume opens with an engaging overview of the global crisis and the role played by international bodies like the G-20 and the WTO. In his survey of international initiatives in response to the recession, Eric Helleiner emphasizes the limits of multilateral crisis management, finding that domestic pressures were more important in reorienting fiscal policy. He also argues that unilateral decisions by national governments to hold large dollar reserves played the key role in preventing a dollar crisis, which would have considerably worsened the downturn. David R. Cameron discusses the fiscal responses of the European Union and its member states. He suggests that a profound coordination problem involving fiscal and economic policy impeded the E.U.'s ability to respond in a timely and effective manner. The volume also features several case studies and country comparisons. Nolan McCarty assesses the performance of the American political system during the crisis. He argues that the downturn did little to dampen elite polarization in the U.S.; divisions within the Democratic Party—as well as the influence of the financial sector—narrowed the range of policy options available to fight the crisis. Ben W. Ansell examines how fluctuations in housing prices in 30 developed countries affected the policy preferences of both citizens and political parties. His evidence shows that as housing prices increased, homeowners expressed preferences for both lower taxes and a smaller safety net. As more citizens supplement their day-to-day income with assets like stocks and housing, Ansell's research reveals a potentially significant trend in the formation of public opinion. Five years on, the prospects for a prolonged slump in economic activity remain high, and the policy choices going forward are contentious. But the policy changes made between 2007 and 2010 will likely constrain any new initiatives in the future. Coping with Crisis offers unmatched analysis of the decisions made in the developed world during this critical period. It is an essential read for scholars of comparative politics and anyone interested in a comprehensive account of the new international politics of austerity.

This book discusses how human beings cope with serious physical ill ness and injury. A conceptual model for understanding the process of coping with the crisis of illness is provided, and basic adaptive tasks and types of coping skills are identified. The major portion of the book is organized around various types of physical illness. These physical illnesses, which almost all people face either in themselves or their family members, raise common relevant coping issues. The last few sections cover "the crisis of treatment," emphasizing the importance of unusual hospital environments and radical new medical treatments, of stresses on professional staff, and of issues related to death and the fear of dying. The material highlights the fact that people can successfully cope with life crises such as major ill ness and inj ury, rather than the fact that severe symptoms and/or breakdowns sometimes occur. The importance of support from professional care-givers, such as physicians, nurses, and social workers, and from family, friends, and other sources of help in the community, is emphasized. Many of the selections include case examples which serve to illustrate the material. Coping with Physical Illness has been broadly conceived to meet the needs of a diverse audience. There is substantial information about how human beings cope with illness and physical disability, but this material has never been collected in one place.