ABSTRACT
‘Crisis intervention’ has all but disappeared from recent social work theory textbooks, and yet its ideas are central to current approaches, including, for example, solution focused brief therapy (see Milner and Myers, 2017; Shennan, 2019.) ‘Crisis intervention’ offers a way of responding to people whose normal coping mechanisms have broken down; Albert R. Roberts (1944–2008) has been one of its foremost champions. Like task centred practice, it is a problem-solving approach, drawing on the early work of Helen Perlman (1957). Both task-centred and crisis intervention theories argue that it is better to work with people who are in trouble in a short-term, focused way, rather than offering open-ended, longer-term support, which, it is argued, may lead to dependency. The selected extract gives no attention to issues of ‘race’, but ‘crisis’ is a term that is frequently applied to the experience of Black people, as the Further Reading explores.
