Sudden Incidents Research Articles

Art Therapy, an effective outreach intervention with traumatized children with suspected acquired brain injury

This paper reviews Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) with a focus on its impact on children, highlighting the use of Art Therapy as a healing psychotherapeutic counseling method. A case study will demonstrate the use of Art Therapy with a child in whom a sudden event produced suspected Acquired Brain Injury (ABI), concurrently with PTSD symptomology. It is common after physical injury for healthcare professionals to work on physical recovery, leaving secondary psychological issues including stress to be assessed later, or when symptomology is evident, rather than examining risk factors at the time. PTSD symptomology can occur immediately after a sudden incident, hindering mind-body recovery. Emotional sequelae can be present long after resolution of physical sequelae, affecting the continuum of complete recovery. It is crucial to resolve emotional difficulties in order to recover completely. Seeing an individual in community outreach allows the traumatic experience to be processed within familiar, non-medical settings, and also acknowledges re-adjustment difficulties in these same settings. Art Therapy allows the use of creative materials to describe feelings and situations. Exercises are goal-oriented, require no artistic skill, and help to process feelings and concepts without having to ‘say’ all the words. Art Therapy is ideal when sensory, verbal or cognitive abilities are affected because it does not rely on verbal output.

From Crisis Prone to Crisis Prepared

Published in Oil & Gas Executive, Volume 1, Number 2, 1998, pages 52-56. Managers tend to race headlong into the future while looking in the rearview mirror (how it was done in the past) and out the side windows (how the competition is doing it). Needless to say, this type of management is counterproductive. If managers spend their time solving problems and resolving crises, little time remains for innovation and competitive leaps. Foresight and anticipation are needed for managers to be more productive with the resources and assets they have at their disposal. Change and uncertainty are inevitable, but they need not be terminal. Success, and in some cases survival, will require more sophisticated intelligence systems. We will need greater collaboration between the communicators (public affairs, public relations), the operators (senior managers), and the planners (strategic planning).Additionally, the managerial mindset must refocus from looking at the organization as first and foremost a profit-maximizing, economic entity to an awareness of the strategic significance of staying tuned in to what is happening outside the organization, in the dynamic social, political, environmental, and technological arenas. "For knowing afar off the evils that are brewing, they are easily cured. But, when for want of such knowledge, they are allowed to grow until everyone can recognize them, there is no longer any remedy to be found."—Machiavelli, The Prince (1513) As Machiavelli counseled long ago, being proactive is wise and affords great advantage. Machiavelli did not, however, provide the strategic and tactical skills necessary for an organization to become more proactive and to gain strategic advantage and avoid crises. In our complex and rapidly changing world, becoming anticipatory and gaining strategic advantage requires sophisticated intelligence-gathering techniques, new decision-process models, and practical accountabilities. These tools allow an organization to capitalize on strategic outside intelligence, to avoid being blind-sided by external forces, to profit from new opportunities, and to turn emerging threats into opportunities. Failure to anticipate and to be proactive, on the other hand, can have destructive consequences. Motorola watched its stock drop 30% when a stakeholder group broke its story about neurological damage from cell phones. Audi (Volkswagen) watched the U.S. sales of its highly profitable Audi 5000plummet 84% after being associated in the media with "sudden acceleration incidents." Like Motorola, Audi stood by as if paralyzed by a media attack of its vehicle, which had 10 years of successful technology to support its safety. IBM, General Motors, Westinghouse, Sears, and the Columbia Broadcasting System also failed to anticipate dramatic external shifts in their respective industries and to avoid the crises they signaled.

The Tylenol Incident, Ensuing Regulation, and Stock Prices

The much publicized Tylenol incident in 1982 led to stringent packaging regulations for over-the-counter pharmaceutical drugs. The sudden incident and the swift progression of associated events offer a unique opportunity to assess the wealth effects of the resultant regulations. The market value of common stock of Johnson & Johnson, makers of Tylenol, declined by approximately 29 percent, amounting to $2.31 billion. Although other firms in the industry also suffered significantly, their share price decline did not occur around the Tylenol incident but occurred around the subsequent packaging reg? ulation proceedings. On average, 28 other pharmaceutical firms analyzed in this study experienced a decline of $310 million per firm, or a total of about $8.68 billion. The results suggest that the regulation had a significant negative effect on the common stock prices of firms in the pharmaceutical industry.

Rape trauma syndrome as circumstantial evidence of rape

One of the more perplexing problems in the prosecution of a rape case is the corroboration of a rape victim's testimony when the defendant and the victim have just met casually and the rape itself was not forcible. The defendant usually admits the intercourse but defends by saying that the victim consented to a casual act of sex. Juries are understandably reluctant to convict under such circumstances without some corroboration of the rape, i.e., the lack of consent. The recent recognition of the rape trauma syndrome as a diagnostic condition not only may be a therapeutic breakthrough, but also may provide the necessary corroboration. The rape trauma syndrome identifies and isolates psychological symptoms of a sudden traumatic incident such as a rape.