Providing Immediate Psychological Support

Active shooter incidents have the potential to cause severe emotional stress, so experts advocate for immediate management of psychological trauma. There are crisis intervention techniques which assist an individual experiencing an overwhelming emotional response to a violent event which can be offered right away, under the umbrella of an "integrated and comprehensive Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) system"⁹.

CISM represents a comprehensive, systematic, and multicomponent approach to managing stress, particularly traumatic stress. CISM covers the complete crisis continuum from precrisis through follow-up services. A few of the key aspects of CISM include:

• Psychological First Aid (PFA): An evidence-informed modular approach to help children, adolescents, adults, and families in the immediate aftermath of disaster and terrorism.
• Skills for Psychological Support (SPR): An evidence-informed modular intervention that aims to help survivors gain skills to manage distress and cope with post-disaster stress and adversity. 
• Critical Incident Stress Debriefings (CISD): Critical Incident Stress Debriefings, which are structured into one- to three-hour, seven-phase group discussions of a highly stressful event. When debriefings are clearly defined and applied properly in the context of a broader, comprehensive, systematic, and multicomponent program, they produce consistently positive results.