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Critical Incident Stress Management.

Call the dispatch line to access the volunteer Peer Responder Team.

1 (604) 670-2772
hello@mountaincism.ca

Addressing critical stress—strong emotions within the first 48 to 72 hours following a critical incident—can greatly reduce the long-term effects of critical incidents for mountain professionals. We have partnered with several mountain associations to form the Mountain Professional Critical Incident Stress Management (MP-CISM) Team. All participating organizations have supported the education of peer responders to offer debriefing and defusing services, follow-up peer support, and other resources to mountain professionals following a critical incident.

The CAA and the Peer Responder Team is here for individual CAA members or those who work for CAA members.

If you have been in a critical incident, you can call the support number. The dispatcher will then put out a call to CISM team volunteers, and an available volunteer will travel to facilitate a debriefing session (or online, if necessary). CISM team peers will support affected individuals in an entirely confidential environment to talk about their experiences, roles, and reactions, without blame. The CISM team offers ways to recognize the impact of a critical incident and reduce the stress associated with it. When appropriate, they’ll also direct individuals to mental health professionals for deeper interventions. If you are calling on behalf of an organization, the CISM coordinator taking your call will work with you to provide the best options at the organizational level.

CISM is designed to help reduce the chance of long-term mental health troubles, such as PTSD, after critical incidents. Critical incidents can include injury or death of a client or colleague in the field, multi-casualty incidents, body recovery, suicide of a colleague, or other consequential events.

Trained Peer Responders lead sessions immediately after the incident where the affected group comes together in a supportive, confidential environment to talk about their experiences, roles, and reactions, without blame. CISM can help workers defuse highly charged emotional situations, return them to full productivity, improve mental health, increase morale, and reduce resignations of highly trained professionals from critical incident stress (CIS) symptoms.

Peers are people like you.

The thing that makes the Mountain Community CISM team so uniquely effective is that it is comprised of peers – your fellow mountain professionals. They speak the same language, have done the same work, and have felt the same fears. The CISM team is a team of mountain professionals for fellow mountain professionals.  

CISM team members are not mental health professionals and they aren’t supposed to be. They are members of your community, supportive ears, and a key step on the post-crisis path. 

Our remote team of volunteer peer responders is spread across Canada in mountain communities; from Vancouver Island to the east side of the Rockies, Fernie to Bella Coola, the CISM team serves a massive area of the Canadian mountain community.

Although most of our peers, and call outs, have been in BC and Alberta, we do have the capacity to respond Canada-wide. To provide a timely and cost effective response many of our debriefs are done virtually.