Psychological first aid (PFA) is a technique designed to reduce the occurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder.
It was developed by the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (NC-PTSD), a section of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, in 2006.
It was developed in a two-day intensive collaboration, involving more than 25 disaster mental health researchers, an online survey of the first cohort that used PFA and repeated reviews of the draft.
[1] According to the NC-PTSD, psychological first aid is an evidence-informed modular approach for assisting people in the immediate aftermath of disaster and terrorism to reduce initial distress and to foster short and long-term adaptive functioning.
Debriefing was a necessary step in a commercially available training intended to reduce PTSD called "Critical Incident Stress Management" (CISM) .
[3] Debriefing was done in a single session with seven stages: introduction, facts, thoughts and impressions, emotional reactions, normalization, planning for future, and disengagement.
[11] A 2024 integrative review concluded that the substantial variation in PFA protocols limits the ability to reach scientific conclusions.