Program helps prepare for crises in communities

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On Oct. 27 and 28, a training seminar called the First Nations Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) for First Nations and Aboriginal Communities will be held at the Hampton Inn in Vancouver. The two-day course will cover First Nations Emergency Services, Defining Stress Terms, Psychological Response to Stress and Group Debriefing/Diffusing.

The program is open to anyone who works in First Nations. It offers frontline workers methods of intervention in traumatic situations.

Bruce Ramsey, a retired firefighter and certified trauma responder instructor, said that every community has traumatic events. He said there needs to be something in place to assist people to recover from traumatic events such as fires, floods, evacuations, multiple deaths in the community, suicide, illnesses or accidents.

"We can give frontline workers an opportunity to talk about stress in a structured way with hopefully a positive outcome at the end of the training program. Most First Nations communities, especially those that are in remote areas, have little or no mental health support there, as in psychologists, etc., so this training program is designed to provide some tools that can be used in the communities which will allow intervention after a traumatic event happens," he said.

"There are unique situations within First Nations communities. Many times traumatic events have taken place where the front line worker responding to the situation is a relative to the victim that is involved in an accident, and in an emergency response organization in a big city that is a rare occurrence ... So we try to look at those things," he said.

"What happens if you go to one of the courses that is put on by non-Aboriginal communities, such as for firefighters or police officers, is that you get information based upon a full-time paid firefighter responding to a call in a city; but the course does not include suicides, residential school experiences and how people who've been in residential school would respond to traumatic situations. In many mainstream courses none of this stuff is taken into consideration."

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The program was developed by Dr. Jeffery Mitchell, an expert in the field of trauma in Maryland, and adapted to fit the needs of First Nations.

"It has been adapted for many different organizations, industry, hospital workers or all kinds of folks. "This is not a fly by the seat kind of program. We've had advice from world-renowned experts who deal with trauma. When the First Nations Emergency Services Society (FNESS) asked me to get involved, their question was 'Can this training course be done for First Nations Fire Fighters?' I said, well of course, because as members of their volunteer department they also respond to traumatic events," he said.

Ramsey, who has been working in First Nations for the last 10 years, said he is also a trauma survivor.

"One of my friends died in a fire, and I never knew when that happened that I was traumatized. Back than we did not even talk about those things, and we did not understand it back in 1975.

"I do not go into a community and tell them that the way they've been doing it all along was wrong, and that they should do it this way. I'm respectful of the fact that people will survive, regardless, if they did not take this course ... This is just a tool. It gives the frontline workers a chance to express their feelings and put them on the table. A safe place so that they do not have this incident as their focal point in their lives because they'd just attended a terrible accident and they'd just seen people who had died and just recovered bodies.

"So they need to talk about their sensory overloads and of what they saw.

"Sometimes, especially in a small community, they won't talk about what they saw because they do not want to hurt the family members of the victim or victims such as aunts, uncles, friends, neighbours or other community members," Bruce Ramsey said.

"Some people in a traumaticsituation say that they thought that they were losing their mind, but people need to understand that there are no abnormal reactions to trauma."

Angela Peters-Oddy, executive administrative assistant for FNESS, is from Canim Lake. She took the course in 2002 at the Okanagan reserve with Ramsey as the instructor.

"He actually gave you insight as to some of the perspectives and some of the characteristics of being under stress. How to deal with stress, and to deal with that stress in a good way instead of turning to alcohol, drugs or whatever just to get through it.

"A debriefing allows people to sit around in a circle-traditionally that is how First Nations people did this. You sit around in a circle and you talk openly about what is happening, what they feel, and how this incident has made them feel," said Peters-Oddy.