Critical Stress During Critical Times [24-2043]

This class, Critical Stress During Critical Times, is the byproduct of a grant that was received by the Virginia Peer Support Association.  This class is the summation of three one-day classes that have been offered to peer supporters throughout the commonwealth.  The class, Critical Stress During Critical Times, is really focusing on how officers can handle that critical incident after dealing with the daily, accumlative chronic stress that they face.  We'd like to educate you a little bit more about how stress impacts you, how it impacts those who you work with, and provide support for so that you can be more functional in your peer support efforts. 

You make referrals for all sorts of needs as a peer supporter.  Those referrals can include anything from financial problems to substance abuse issues and referring someone out to some program that might be able to assist with that.  The process of making that referral will certainly be a function of your SOPs, but also, hopefully, your training will end up helping you in establishing that.  In this training we're going to be focusing on the "how to" recognize when a person needs certain types of services related to critical incident stress or chronic stress overload.

In order to to this, you are going to need a deeper understanding of critical stress and how it affects the minds and body of an officer. You will learn that emotions have a physical connedtion to the body, that stress can be measured and understood, and that stress management is a conscious effort.