Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM): a statistical review of the literature

Abstract

Crisis intervention has emerged over the last 50 years as a proven method for the provision of urgent psychological support in the wake of a critical incident or traumatic event. The history of crisis intervention is replete with singular, time-limited interventions. As crisis intervention has evolved, more sophisticated multicomponent crisis intervention systems have emerged. As they have appeared in the extant empirically-based literature, their results have proven promising. A previously published paper narratively reviewed the Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) model of multicomponent crisis intervention. The purpose of this paper was to offer a statistical review of CISM as an integrated multicomponent crisis intervention system. Using the methodology of meta-analysis, a review of eight CISM investigations revealed a Cohen's d of 3.11. A fail-safe number of 792 was similarly obtained.