An integrated grief-focused intervention after the death of a chief teacher

During the SARS outbreak in 2003, a chief middle school teacher in Beijing unfortunately died of the disease. After her death, her students and colleagues fell into a state of emotional and behavioral disturbance. We describe in this paper a grief-focused intervention program offered by the community-based youth hotline crisis intervention group and the school counselor. In particular, the paper focuses on describing in detail a group based intervention program for the affected students, including its administrative structure, therapeutic objectives and interventions, and group process. The intervention protocol was designed by combining cognitive behavior and social therapy with some adapted skills of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). It was found that stabilization and installation were strongly significant in helping the students to recover from this traumatic event by focusing on positive resources. We argue that in the Chinese cultural context, it is most important to build such an integrated crisis intervention scheme to cope with such an event.

Conference

English

Yuchuan Yang

Yang, Y. (2005, June). An integrated grief-focused intervention after the death of a chief teacher. In Psychotrauma and EMDR in China and Slovakia, Part 1. Symposium conducted at the 6th EMDR Europe Association Conference, Brussels, Belgium