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IN SUMMARY
Crises come in red, yellow, and black. Crisis intervention is always in carefully and caringly controlled shades of blue. In any crisis, the individual has a predominating mood or tone. This mood is typically anger (red); anxiety, fear, and an extreme feeling of discomfort (yellow); or depression, despair, a sense of hopelessness and futility (black). In crisis situations, the individual frequently vacillates, presenting a mix of moods or dispositions. Whether the individual mood or tone stays fairly constant or tends to fluctuate, the intervention response should be calm and not “feed into” or exacerbate the individual’s intense crisis mood. A blue intervention response will tend to help the individual calm down, develop an increased perspective, think more clearly, and plan ahead. The mood or tone conveyed by crisis intervention workers may be communicated through the tone of their voice, their individual speech patterns, whether they talk rapidly or slowly, and through the words they use to express their ideas and thoughts. We must start where the individual in crisis is, and this involves recognizing, understanding, and acknowledging his crisis color; gradually and gently urging him to focus on his situation; gradually filtering or absorbing the intense emotions within the crisis; and moving toward consideration of possible solutions.