Characteristics of Project Liberty clients that predicted referrals to intensive mental health services

The authors describe characteristics of Project Liberty crisis counseling recipients that predicted referral to more intensive professional mental health treatments over the two-year period after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

Random-effects ordinal regression models were applied to data from 684,500 logs of Project Liberty service encounters for individual counseling sessions.

Overall, about 9 percent of individual counseling visits ended with a referral to professional mental health services. Individuals needing intensive mental health treatment continued to enter Project Liberty for two years after the World Trade Center attacks. The strongest predictor of referral was having reactions to the attack that fell into a greater number of the four domains assessed-behavioral, emotional, physical, or cognitive domains. Individuals with reactions in four domains were most likely to be referred. Those who had greater attack-related exposure were also more likely to be referred.

It is important to provide long-term access to brief counseling and triage services and to target these interventions specifically to individuals displaying greater distress or impairment and having more traumatic exposure.