Critical Incident Stress

Critical incidents are powerful events that temporarily overwhelm an individual's or a group's ability to function normally. Critical incidents can stimulate psychological growth or cause significant psychological damage. Examples of critical incidents include workplace deaths, suicide of a colleague, life-threatening on-the-job injuries, injuries or deaths to children, disasters, injuries or deaths to loved ones, violence, accidents, military combat, complicated and dangerous rescues, and events with elevated personal threat.

Critical incidents are viewed as horrible, terrible, awful, grotesque, overwhelming, frightening, threatening, or disgusting. They generate a wide range of physical and psychological symptoms. Most people recover rapidly after a critical incident and do not require formal psychological intervention. If not managed carefully, however, a critical incident can become the source of long-lasting conditions such as substance abuse, phobic reactions, depression, panic disorders, or posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Critical incidents are the starting point for critical incident stress.

The term critical incident stress was developed in the mid-1970s to describe an expected and typical response of normal, psychologically healthy people after an extraordinary traumatic event (the critical incident). It originated because emergency services, military, and disaster workers needed nonclinical terminology that could be easily understood and applied to their experiences.

Critical incident stress is routinely used to describe the cognitive, physical, emotional, behavioral, and spiritual reactions of people who experience psychologically disturbing events, frequently as a result of their jobs. Exposure to the critical incident is key. Without exposure to the traumatic event, there would be no critical incident stress reaction. Some mental health professionals use the phrase as a synonym for terms such as posttraumatic stress and traumatic stress. Military and emergency services personnel prefer critical incident stress, because the term is less clinical and more applicable to their experience. These are hardy people, who periodically encounter severe psychological threats, unusually distressing circumstances, gory sights and sounds, and other unsettling critical incidents.