The Samaritans are one of the most well-known suicide prevention organizations, helping individuals in distress via telephone, email and even through postal mail, over 5 million times a year (Pollack et. al. 2008) The Samaritans teach their volunteers the skills of active listening and the value of self-determination, and therefore most Samaritan organizations use no caller…
Tag: professional development
How to Help People Experiencing Sexual Violence
Sexual violence is a term that applies to a number of crimes including sexual assault, sexual harassment, rape, and any other scenario where a person has experienced unwanted sexual contact or the threat of unwanted sexual contact. At Durham College and UOIT, I sat on a Working Group that drafted a new “Sexual Violence Response…
Crisis Call Outcome Form
The Crisis Call Outcome Form (CCOF) is a tool used to measure the impact of telephone crisis calls. It was originally used in a 1989 study in the Journal of Community Psychology (Echterling & Hartsough, 1989) to help them determine the stages or phases of helping in successful crisis calls to the Lafeyette Crisis Center….
Improving Your Helpline Work
As a volunteer or paid helpline worker, we all endeavour to improve our work on the lines. Whether you have 100 or 1000 hours on your helpline there will always be things you can learn and strategies that you can apply to better connect with callers. Listed below are a few strategies you can implement…
Declining Empathy in Social Work Students
I read an interesting article recently, from the Journal of Social Work Education, the title was “An Evaluation of Prepracticum Helping Skills Training for Graduate Social Work Students.” The abstract is reproduced below: “Although foundational practice classes play a key role in helping prepracticum students develop counseling skills, we know little about the effectiveness of…