Family Based Crisis Intervention: A Case Study

This intervention is a family-based crisis intervention in the emergency department it is a new model of care. Adolescent suicide is on the rise and treatment resources are scarce. Adolescents with suicidal behavior often are evaluated in the emergency department (ED), where the default treatment recommendation traditionally has been admission to an inpatient psychiatric unit (Ginnis, 2015). Emergency medicine increasingly provides intervention in the ED with the goal of stabilization and discharge, avoiding unnecessary inpatient stays that are expensive and utilize resources (Ginnis, 2015). Family-based crisis intervention (FBCI) is a manualized psychiatric intervention that is used to optimize care for suicidal adolescents and their families
in the ED (Ginnis, 2015). Family-based crisis intervention represents a paradigm shift away from traditional emergency psychiatry practice. There are three assumptions that it is based off of, the first, there may be better alternatives to treat a suicidal crisis than inpatient hospitalization, second, families/caregivers want and are able to provide support to an adolescent family member if given both an opportunity and effective tools to utilize, and third a family that learns to support their adolescent while s/he is in crisis will be empowered to continue to provide ongoing support once the acute psychiatric crisis subsides (Ginnis, 2015). All components of FBCI are essential to the intervention; experienced clinicians can flexibly utilize different modules depending on an adolescent and caregivers needs (Ginnis, 2015). The goal of FBCI is to help the patient and family/caregivers engage in crisis intervention to reduce the patient’s suicidality (Ginnis, 2015).