Individuals facing danger

Developments in the field of safety extend throughout much of the world, indicating an increasing concern for the quality of working life. In Europe the number of directives promulgated by the European Economic Community are evidence of this growing official awareness of the dangers that the individual faces in his work. 

Anxiety is an emotional state commonly caused by the perception of real or perceived danger that threatens the security of an individual. It allows a person to prepare for or react to environmental changes. Everyone experiences a certain amount of nervousness and apprehension when faced with a stressful situation. This is an adaptive response, and is transient in nature. 

Clients and their family members are faced daily with the stigma attached to mental illness. Many people view the mentaUy ill, especially people with schizophrenia, as dangerous. The use of words like maniac, schizo, and psycho by uninformed media enforces this viewpoint. The media often present the mentally ill as dangerous individuals just waiting for the opportunity to explode, when in reality people who do not have such illnesses commit 95% of all homicides. Those with schizophrenia are more likely to harm themselves than someone else (Ferriman, 2(KX)). This tendency to harm oneself often rests with the guilt that many clients feel as they blame themselves for their illness. 

Fear is a strong and depressed emotional state which individuals or groups felt deeply in danger of real or imagined. It often manifests as nervous, fear, inability to concentrate, mind going blank, and inability to correctly judge or control behavior. Fear is an innate emotional response of all animal including human. Fear is emotional reaction to an expected to be hurt or unpleasant when face stressors, which usually cause avoidance behavior. 

Hale, A.R. and Glendon, A.l. Individual Behavior in the Face of Danger. Amsterdam, the Netherlands Elsevier, 1987. 

Hale and Glendon combined the insights of the two major models presented so far (Figures 13.2 and 13.6) with other sources into a model of individual behaviour in the face of danger (Figure 13.7). 

As an individual perceives or recognizes data or stimuli and then conceives the input as a danger, they must move to the projection of the outcome and formulation of an action plan. However, one should not wait until this time to begin mental and/or physical preparation for a response. Although you cannot train for every situation that you may face, you can formulate and prepare a plan for the most common dangers and hazards you may face. This is also true in the school environment, where faculty and staff should know the highest risk locations, activities, and situations they may face each day. 

Suppliers of chemicals should be able to provide information on the toxicity of any product they supply. It is practically impossible to discover the concentration or toxicity of a material whose chemical composition is not known. The use of such materials presents unknown hazards to the conservator and, incidentally, to the objects. Individuals can vary in their sensitivities to chemicals. When one has been sensitized, irritation can occur at much lower concentrations than the average. To counter the possible dangers, periodic checks on the atmosphere breathed by a conservator are desirable. These should be made in the same conditions as normally found around the face of the worker, with solvent swabs, containers of solvents and solvent-covered objects in their normal positions. 

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