CRISIS PREVENTION AND CRISIS TREATMENT

This paper reviews the notion of stages of crisis and offers a concept ual distinction between the pre-problem or anticipatory crisis stage, and the crisis stage characterized by the onset of the actual problem and the resulting crisis. This distinction allows the practitioner to further differentiate an intervention as being essentially crisis prev ention in contrast to crisis treatment. Based on an analysis of curren t crisis intervention literature, beginning empirical support is offer ed for the contrast between crisis prevention and crisis treatment. It is further proposed that various practice methods are more appropriat ely used with one or the other of these interventions.