Hi. In this video we will talk on the role of stressing vital events in psychological first aid. Stressing vital events are events that happen in our daily life which challenge both our psychological and biological capacities. They can be traumatic facts such as disasters, abuse, physical violence, but also chronic stress situations such as being poor, economical difficulties or having a chronic disease, either us or a close relative. Finally we also consider vital stressing events things much more usual in our daily life such as a divorce, a marriage or a son leaving our house. In 1976 a scale was created to register the stressing vital events people suffered. It was made by Holmes and Rahe and as an example I show you some of what would be considered vital stressing events: the death of a couple in a marriage, at a working level a retirement, a residence change, being fired, also beginning a new job. As you can see the events range is very wide and we don't have them all categorized in our mind as something bad or unpleasant. What do these events produce? They produce some answers both at a motor and at a cognitive thoughts level. And also at a psycho-physiological level, our body and our mind try to adapt to this new stressing situation which involves an important grade of stress. If we can't adapt, this might give us health problems, it might even be the generator or the trigger for the apparition of certain illnesses or aggravate some we already had. Generally, it's a fact that makes people unstable if we can't adapt to it, it makes all our environment unstable because us, with our maladjustment, all our social, work and personal environments also upset. Cerebrovascular accidents (CVA) have been studied as risk factors, we just said that they can be the triggers in an illness, or they can aggravate an already existent illness. But it's true that there are people that suffer many of these CVAs during their lives and however they still adapt to them. We say that these people are resilient. Their importance lies on how they solve these CVAs, if we can generate valid confrontation strategies which allow us to adapt to the new situation, to the new environment, and so we don't only generate them but we can also apply them properly, or we can't and so we can't face the new situation. How do we apply all this in psychological first aid? How are CVA related to assisting with psychological first aid? They give us information on the person's capacity to face traumatic incidents. We know which tools he has or whether he has previous tools or not. It allows us to reinforce all these strategies that have previously worked for this person. So the fact of reminding him of what he did in that moment can be useful now, it can give the person some feeling of control because he knows the task he must do. This is important towards working with people who just suffered a traumatic event. But what happens if these vital stressing events haven't been properly solved in the past? We can find some associated problems, as these traumatic events have been piled up without being solved, and this has generated frustration on the person, and the feeling that he is living a lot of things and he can't manage them. And every time he lives a stressing vital event the old wounds that haven't healed open again. All these problems accumulated, all these strong feelings, all these physical reactions, make the middle and long term prognosis worse. So we must have this very clear when we are applying psychological first aid. How are we going to manage this? Well, as we said in the video on how to apply psychological first aid, during the first moment in which we have to gather information, we get close to the person and, in a controlled and quiet environment, we gather his information, we can ask depending on what happened. If he had another moment in his life in which he had to face something similar. If he tells us he hadn't, we'll know there won't be anything to which we can hold to use strategies from the past. Usually people tells us things although they aren't quite similar, but they tell us things on a similar situation. Usually people tell us how many bad things happened to them, such as "my husband died, my son left home last year and he's in Germany now". So this anecdotes we find in this kind of situations is what we must use to set up this person's stressing vital events history. What kind of information can we get from here? We can get which are the strong points this person has in the sense of how he managed the other events and if he left these situations harmed or unharmed, and weak points in the sense of if he has any non-solved traumatic event that is blocked and that would come back due to this new event and difficult all these symptoms, even aggravating this situation up to the point it becomes chronic. So it is very important that we have a register of the stressing vital events people suffered, because towards a tracking and preventive monitoring which is the key to avoid generating any kind of disorder, it is very important having knowledges on these vital events, as they will help us managing the current one properly.