CU Teen Crisis Intervention Expert Gives Intensive Training Program in Russia

With skyrocketing rates of drug and alcohol abuse and teen suicide throughout Russia, the city of Nizhni Novgorod needed ways to help its youth cope with anger and despair. As part of this effort, Martha Holden, director of Cornell's Residential Child Care Project, gave an intensive seven-day training in Russia last month.

With two interpreters and her 312-page manual translated into Russian exactly, including format and colored coding, Holden and two colleagues gave the CornellFamily Life Development Center (FLDC) Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI) training to 16 college professors, psychologists and others who, in turn, will train child care workers in behavior management skills to enable them to manage acute anger and despair in their young charges.

The center's training program is used throughout this country and the English-speaking world; it's offered nine times a year in New York state and about 30 times throughout North America, Europe and Australia, as part of the Residential Child Care Project, a unit of FLDC, a research, outreach and training facility with responsibilities in the areas of family stress and child abuse and maltreatment. Although the training has been translated into Spanish and delivered in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, this is the first time the training has been given in a non-English-speaking country.

The therapeutic crisis intervention training teaches residential child-care staff who work in group homes, institutions and foster care settings how to prevent crises, de-escalate conflicts, manage acute crisis phases and reduce potential and actual injury to children and staff. It also helps institutions maintain documentation and provides follow->up refresher courses.

"In Russia, problem youths are either in adult jails or attend special classes at schools," said Holden, a senior extension associate who has been conducting these trainings since 1990. The group in Nizhni Novgorod, the third largest-city in Russia, which was closed to foreigners for 45 years until 1990 and formerly was known as Gorky, heard about Cornell's model program through the British Council, which funded the trip and training in Russia.

"With my Cornell colleagues, Nick Pidgeon and Jack Holden, we tried to help the Russians look at a young person in crisis as an opportunity to 'deconstruct' the event with the kids involved and give them better ways to behave. At the same time, we show child-care workers how to learn from each crisis and discuss strategies with the youth so that similar situations may be handled better next time," Holden said. "We also work on the climate of child caring organizations, to ensure that supervisors help child-care workers avoid power struggles and provide adequate support to employees."

Holden will continue to consult with the Russian group as it develops its programs. Their plight will be difficult, she said, as these professionals taking her training earn only abut $5 a week, face numerous challenges such as tremendous housing shortages and have few, if any, legislation or regulations to guide them.

"Their situation is serious," she said, "but I hope our training will at least help get a residential program off the ground to help their problem teen-agers."