Social Services Training and Workshops (Details)

Grace Under Fire: Effective Strategies with Aggressive and Mentally Ill Individuals for mental health professionals, social services personnel, schools and hospital staff
Grace Under Fire: Effective Strategies with Aggressive and Mentally Ill Students, Family Members and Other People on School Ground for teachers, administrators, counselors, mental health professionals, nurses, and other school staff members
The Elementals: Strategic Communication with Individual with Character Disorders for social service personnel and mental health professionals
Self Protection and Evasion Tactics for hospitals, mental health centers and schools
Interventions with Suicidal Individuals for mental health professional, social services personnel, schools and hospital staff
Training Concerning Domestic Violence for prosecutors, social service personnel and/or domestic violence advocates exclusively, or as an interdisciplinary training with law enforcement
Grand Rounds: Clinical Supervision Concerning Difficult Cases for mental health agencies, hospitals, and other clinical settings dealing with mentally ill and personality disordered individuals

Presenters: Ellis Amdur or Renee Balodis-Cox

Our society is becoming increasingly violent, and sadly, mentally ill individuals are not immune to this trend. With substance abuse and poverty compounding problems, agencies must become increasingly concerned to assist their employees in maintaining their own safety. Aggressive behavior often occurs with no advanced warning. It can occur in a client’s home, out on the street, or in an agency office.

Edgework offers training in a tailor made format to suit the needs of your agency. This can encompass the needs of social workers, case workers, nurses, disabled-housing staff, school personnel, mental health professionals, emergency room staff, as well as agency support staff. Each program is designed to address concerns around the types of clients you must interact with, and the types of aggression that they potentially express.

Core Program

The core program is set up in an initial consultation and offers strategies specific to the needs of the agency and its employees, as well as the type of individuals who present that agency with problematic behavior. Specific topics to be addressed can include:

• Verbal de-escalation techniques
• Basic understanding of mental illness
• Use of spacing, stance, the eyes and voice to calm an individual or establish control
• Establishing lines of communication with the mentally ill
• Physical evasion and protective tactics during attacks
• Balancing the demands of difficult clients with the needs of other clients

Clinical Settings

Edgework training is unique among programs concerned with aggressive individuals in its clinical orientation. Even though the focus is on aggression and violence, Edgework training will enhance one’s clinical skills. 

Consultation

Ellis Amdur also provides agencies with individualized consultation to deal effectively with problematic or politically sensitive cases.

GRACE UNDER FIRE: EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES WITH AGGRESSIVE
AND MENTALLY ILL STUDENTS, FAMILY AND OTHER PEOPLE
ON SCHOOL GROUNDS
For Teachers, Administrators, Counselors, Mental Health Professionals,
Nurses and other school staff members

Presenters: Ellis Amdur or Renee Balodis-Cox

Violence touches all areas of society, and we can no longer have any illusions that the schools are a sanctuary. Both parents and kids are abusing ever-more-dangerous drugs, and even such laudable programs as “mainstreaming” bring more complicated problems to schools as behaviorally and emotionally disturbed children have to find a place in what can be a highly stimulating or chaotic environment for them.

Our society is becoming increasingly violent. Sadly, students and their families are not immune to this trend. With substance abuse, and poverty compounding problems, schools must become increasingly concerned to assist their employees and students in maintaining their own safety.

Aggressive behavior often occurs with no apparent advanced warning. It is not at all uncommon to encounter students or family members who show some signs of mental illness or personality disorder. It is crucial to understand how to deal safely and effectively with these situations.

Edgework offers training in a tailor made format to suit the needs of your school. This can encompass the needs of teachers, administrators, counselors, mental health professionals, nurses, and other school staff members including support staff, clerical and otherwise.

Tactical de-briefing – Distressing or frightening incidents can be discussed in a non-critical fashion to attempt to develop more effective strategies when they are necessary, to support staff in the difficult decisions they have made, and often to affirm that there is no perfect solution, but that staff did the best they could have under sometimes nearly impossible conditions.

This training will improve staff ability to:

• Prevent emotional distress and burnout
• Work in their students' best interests
• Improve relationships between administration and front line workers such as teachers, aides, counselors and school nurses
• Handle difficult situations without becoming over involved with either students or family members
• Improve teamwork among administrators and staff in handling high intensity, threatening, or litigious families

Core Program

The core program is set up in an initial consultation and offers strategies specific to the needs of the school and its employees. This includes both special needs children and those in mainstream classes.

Specific topics to be addressed can include:

• Verbal de-escalation techniques
• Basic understanding of mental illness and emotional disturbance in children
• Use of spacing, stance, the eyes and voice to calm an individual or establish control
• Personal security – including techniques of evasion and deflection of blows, and safe restraint tactics 
• Handling complaints and grievances
• Physical evasion and protective tactics during attacks
• Balancing the demands of difficult students and their families with the needs of other students

Consultation

Edgework also provides schools with individualized consultation to deal effectively with problematic or politically sensitive cases, as well as developing creative strategies to best serve those children who have the hardest time in the school environment.

Character disorders, also known as personality disorders, are fixed patterns of behavior that particularly manifest themselves in inter-personal relationships. Each character disorder can be regarded as an ineffective attempt to control one's own world by ordering it in a predictable way. Paradoxically, such individuals experience lives of greater chaos, because their imposition of their own personality traits cannot be accepted by others.

This program is tailor-made to the needs of your agency. Content is based on staff members' professional role and the types of individuals who offer the most problematic situations.

Some or all of the personality disorders will be considered as is relevant to your professional responsibilities. Effective ways of communication with people who have psychopathic/anti-social, paranoid, histrionic, borderline, narcissistic, or other pervasive, fixed behavioral patterns will then be presented. In addition to a consideration of the characteristic behaviors and patterns of interactions that are typical of each of the “desperate styles” of living, strategies to control and minimize destructive behaviors will be discussed. 

Presentation topics include:

• Phenomenology of some or all of the various character disorders
• Strategic interventions to most effectively deal with such individuals
• Coordination of treatment among the various individuals responsible for the client
• Handling difficult situations without becoming over involved with either clients or family members
• Minimization of splitting – improve teamwork among administrators and staff in handling high intensity, threatening, or litigious individuals
• Control of aggressive, suicidal and para-suicidal threats

Consultation

Mr. Amdur also provides agencies with individualized consultation to deal effectively with problematic or politically sensitive cases.

SELF PROTECTION AND EVASION TACTICS
For Personnel Working in Hospitals, Mental Health Centers and Schools

Presented by Ellis Amdur

The following techniques are offered for inpatient and outpatient settings. They can be adapted to adults, youth and children. Edgework will always undertake a detailed consultation, so that the techniques are the safest possible for staff, clients or students, as well as being in full compliance with federal and state laws and statutes. Please note that this training is NOT a full restraint training, including working with different modes of mechanical restraint. 

• A simple method of physical evasion of attacks, against either unarmed attacks or hand held weapons. These methods are geared for non-athletes. They are a “stripped-down” set of movements which, if practiced regularly, will enable most individuals to evade harm long enough for a “show of force” to assemble.
• Show of force – a coordinated set of actions by agency personnel which presents a united front to the aggressive individual, so that the object of his or her hostility is not isolated as a victim
• Methods of working with law enforcement
• How to check on co-workers to ascertain if they are in dangerous situations behind closed doors.
• Physical guidance method – hands-on techniques to guide a slightly aggressive individual to another locale.
• Solo Take-down technique– an emergency method to bring an aggressive individual safely to the floor to enable the victim(s) of attack to escape .

INTERVENTIONS WITH SUICIDAL INDIVIDUALS
For Mental Health Professionals, Social Services Personnel, Schools and Hospital Staff

Presented by Ellis Amdur

Without understanding why the individual chooses to threaten to kill himself or herself, it is nearly impossible to intervene with them. Suicide is not only an individual action – it almost always involves other people. Whether intentional or not, suicidal ideation is an action which always harms others as well as the client. 

Beyond basic safety concerns, perhaps the first question one asks regarding a suicidal individual is “Who are the intended victims?” Second, “Who are all the people who would be hurt” whether it is intentional or not?

• Standard assessment and intervention skills for therapists
• Creative strategies to work with resistant and hard-to-reach clients – We will focus on individuals with personality disorders, for whom suicidal ideation is one frequently displayed symptom. 
• Assessing the meaning of the suicidal ideation
• This training can also include supportive discussion/supervision regarding clients who are currently at risk, or a debriefing regarding any client who did commit suicide. 
  
  

NOTE: This training can be provided in various formats. Exclusively for law enforcement, prosecutors social services personnel, domestic violence advocates, or as an inter-disciplinary training bringing all the respective parties together.

Among the most difficult situations that anyone might face are those associated with domestic violence. What makes them especially complicated is the overlap of different agencies and personnel with responsibilities that may come into conflict. It is law enforcement’s responsibility to arrest perpetrators of violence, and the prosecutor’s to ensure that solid cases go to court. Therapists, on the other hand, have a primary responsibility of helping survivors of abuse heal, whereas domestic violence advocates are the strong right arm of the victims, who work among the various systems and personnel to ensure that they are not victimized yet again.  

These situations are further complicated by the tangle of conflicting psychological issues of the disputants, and not infrequently further exacerbated by substance abuse on the part of victims as well as perpetrators.  

This training will focus on both crisis intervention and more long-term tactical intervention in these situations. Mr. Amdur will discuss the most typical psychological types of individuals enmeshed in such disputes, as well as verbal de-escalation tactics to make interventions go as smoothly as they possibly can, enabling the various individuals involved in such a case to work together most effectively.  

GRAND ROUNDS:
Clinical Supervision Concerning Difficult Cases

Presenter: Ellis Amdur

In this combination of clinical supervision and training, Mr. Amdur works with a treatment team and discusses difficult cases and clincial situations presented by that team. This includes therapeutic interventions specific to the individual of concern, systemic responses, and general clinical information to aid in differential diagnosis and treatment. Participants have found this to be both intellectually exciting and a lot of fun as ideas and strategies are thrown into the mix, usually resulting in creative strategies to work with some of their most challenging cases.