To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. FROM REACTIVE TO PROACTIVE clear things right up. Other times it might be a little more serious, but something you can nip in the bud. Maybe someone has just stopped taking their medication. Often it just takes a friendly, supportive voice or someone to listen to them to get things quickly right back on track.” “Most—I’d say 98 percent—of what behavioral intervention is about is providing support,” he explained. “Its core function is to not so much to say, ‘This person may become the next shooter.’” Sometimes, however, the stakes of intervention can be much higher. Last year at Iowa State University, for instance, the university’s Student Assistance Follow-Up and Evaluation Team received multiple reports that a former student living near campus had made threats to kill people. Members of the intervention team, including a mental health professional and a detective, went to the man’s house to speak with him and saw a cache of weapons. Determining that the man seemed to be a legitimate threat to the campus, they persuaded him to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. After his release, the team continued to visit the man to monitor his progress and even drove him on numerous occasions to therapeutic appointments. A foremost challenge in making an intervention team a success, Bourgeois added, is creating what he called “a culture of reporting.” “It’s critical,” he said, “that the school not only publicize the fact that a program exists but be completely transparent about what it’s about and how it operates. Lack of transparency about the process,” he cautioned, “breeds a fear that this is some sort of Big Brother secret conspiracy, which is not at all what this is about. A culture of reporting as we describe it means one where everyone feels encouraged and responsible to report incidents that suggest there might be a problem, whether it’s someone acting very erratically or showing up for class drunk, or someone missing multiple classes.” He added, “To cultivate this kind of a culture, there has to be a complete trust on the part of the community that this information is not going to be abused.” Yet another important challenge for teams, according to Erica Woodley, director of Residential Education and Community Standards at Tulane University in New Orleans, La., is getting top-level “buy-in” at the highest levels of university governance. “Buy-in needs to be earned on a number of levels,” Woodley said. “One obvious one is that it needs to be understood by everyone that a behavioral intervention program is supported on the highest levels, which is why a senior school manager ideally should serve on the team. … It’s critical to make sure the team meets regularly, the ideal being at least once a week.” Challenges Behavioral intervention is not without its critics. At a conference on “Violence on Campus: Prediction, Prevention and Response,” held at Columbia University, New York City, in April 2008, Edward Mulvey, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said, “Rare events, by their nature, are not going to be very predictable.” Mulvey argued that any formula used to identify students at 40 May 2009 | Homeland Security Today Magazine This month’s issue is now available online at…