Threat Management and Psychological Services

TOPICS OF EXPERTISE
Right in the Head provides advice and training in a range of topics and specialities.

Our materials and services are tailored to the needs of the client, from individuals to large organisations.

In addition to the workshops and training on this page, Right in the Head can formulate a package to order.

Topics include: 
 
  • Cyber culture awareness
  • ​Fear management
  • Social media threats & online problem behaviours
  • Assessment and management of internet harm
  • Organisational threat assessment and management
  • Adolescent developmental risks and needs
  • Psychodynamic understanding of deviance

EXAMPLE WORKSHOPS & TRAINING

  1. Online Behavioural Threat Management
    Overview of emerging threats from the internet and social media, including trends, red flags, and contemporary risk management techniques.
  2. Cyber Culture Competence
    The internet is a rapidly-evolving space, where identity and community take new and sometimes strange forms. This training covers broad cultural themes, prominent online communities, internet-speak, online social norms, and how to navigate a digital world of 4 billion inhabitants.
  3. Challenges of Online Behavioural Assessment
    The internet and social media can be powerful tools for stalking, threats, bullying and intimidation. This training examines risk identification, complexities of assessment, approaches to management, and remaining areas of uncertainty.
  4. Establishing a Threat Assessment Program
    This workshop details the plan, structure, resourcing and operation of a contemporary threat management program, based on international best-practice and the knowledge gained from building a successful campus threat management unit.
  5. Essential Elements of Threat Management Teams
    Breaking down specialist roles and techniques for organisational threat management teams, to minimise error and maximise effectiveness.
  6. Responding to Organisational Sexual Harm Allegations
    Sexual harm is a sensitive and often risky topic for organisations that can involve a delicate balance between internal intervention and external criminal processes. This seminar examines defensible responses for handling such disclosures.
  7. Mental Health Basics for the Non-Clinician
    Basic mental health principles and terminology common to threat management practice, to equip threat professionals and front-line workers for recognising and responding effectively to signs of mental illness.
  8. Bad, Sad, or Mad: Working with Hard-to-Like Clients
    Customers and clients are sometimes rude, aggressive or scary. This seminar looks at poor client behaviour, where it may come from, and how we can handle it proactively for the benefit of both staff and clients.
  9. 13 Reasons More: The Adolescent Translator
    Modern adolescents are under siege from their hormones, peers, social media and maturing brains. This presentation examines the needs and issues driving difficult juvenile behaviours, how to engage young people successfully, and manage them therapeutically.
  10. Professional Boundaries: Trust vs Privacy
    Relationships between clients and staff require trust, but also need limits and rules that protect both parties from harm and liability. This training highlights the importance of maintaining professional boundaries, recognising boundary violations, and troubleshooting challenges.
  11. Dealing with Distressed and Disruptive Behaviours
    This training provides an understanding of behaviours that can cause offence, fear, or trauma, and equips delegates with practical strategies for responding to disruptive behaviours in a safe and defensible manner.
  12. Threat Management: A Tabletop Experience
    An interactive training experience that allows participants to discuss and troubleshoot challenging cases of behavioural threats via a dynamic real-time exercise in quick thinking and applied expertise.
PAST EVENTS
Posting a threat:
Threat management in the cyber world
Deakin University, Burwood 
Welcome to the internet! Go shopping. Collect memes. Find old friends. Just don’t feed the trolls.

The creation of a global communication network has revolutionised work, commerce, and relationships, but it also provides a powerful platform for
targeted aggression and intrusive problem behaviours. From Facebook cyberstalking and Twitter lynch mobs to doxxing, brigading, and image-based abuse, modern threat assessors face an array of ever-shifting challenges, and logging off is not an option.

Online problem behaviour has increased sharply in recent years, and the outcomes suggest that traditional approaches to threat management struggle when faced with the badly behaved who are transnational, anonymised, and multi-actor. Targets of online threats who expect that police, the judiciary, and independent experts will take online risks seriously and provide effective
solutions are often left with their safety and wellbeing compromised.

This presentation reviews the state of threat management in cyberspace, looking at common tools and theories, and examines strategies developed by the video gaming and social media industries to help threat assessors meet the critical challenges of problem behaviour in a society that never logs off.
Hosted by  Mielenrauha koulutuspalvelut Oy / Peace of Mind
 Helsinki, Finland 
Identifying online problem behaviour
  • Forms of online behaviour where risk may be present
  • Recognising problem behaviour and “trolling”
  • Who, where, and why of online problem behaviour

​Assessing online problem behaviour
  • Challenges of measuring risk and harm online
  • Strengths and weaknesses of current risk assessment tools for online harm
  • Policy and protocol for providing consistent responses

Management and teamwork
  • Common limitations of responses to online harm
  • Recommendations for interventions that minimise harm and maximise recovery
  • Organisational responses to persistent online harm​

Dealing with strange and discomforting clients
  • Differences between unusual and harmful behaviours
  • Basic signs of mental illness
  • Managing and maintaining boundaries with unusual clients to reduce risk

When difficult clients turn harmful
  • Understanding aggression, persistence, and intrusion
  • Measuring “gut feeling” for dangerous behaviours
  • Where to draw the line between support and safety needs

Teamwork and management
  • Team responses to unacceptable client behaviour
  • Support for staff and peers
  • Creating psychologically safe workplaces​
  • Meeting professional responsibilities and duty of care while holding clients accountable for problematic behaviours
  • Capacity to recognise needs of targets and identify supports that encourage recovery

QuAIC relief: 
Qualifying the “gut feeling” in case triage
AETAP Annual Conference, Helsinki, Finland 
Organisational threat management is dependent on effective triage – the process of prioritising cases based on severity, imminence and availability of resources.While professional threat managers are able to rely on experience, expert knowledge, and clinical tools in assessing threats, other staff and stakeholders in an organisation may hesitate to flag low-level problem behaviours, even when prolonged, sometimes allowing behavioural threats to escape notice until critical or chronic. 

Additionally, common threat assessment tools that focus on specific behaviours such as stalking, aggression, or sexual harm may fail to capture overall risk when those behaviours are low-grade but persistent. Large organisations therefore require assessment protocols that allow untrained and often time-poor staff to translate holistic observations of problem behaviour - “gut feeling” - into effective referrals to management and threat assessment staff.

The Quadrants of Aggression & Intrusion Concern (QuAIC) framework presents practical, clinical jargon-free methods of determining approximate severity of behavioural threats, providing reporters with visual indicators for case referral to specialist threat managers and teams.

This presentation provides an overview of trends and methods in threat assessment triage, explores common challenges and obstacles to effective early intervention, and discusses practical applications of the QuAIC framework for encouraging and qualifying early reporting.
  1. Slow connection: Old laws vs virtual threats [ANZAPPL Congress]
    While police and courts have a blueprint for responding to verbal threats or in-person stalking, the situation becomes unclear when a threat comes in the form of an anonymous email, revenge porn on a Russian server, or a storm of tweets from aggressors seemingly unconnected to the target. Without specific training and protocols for handling modern, tech-assisted threats, police may feel out of their depth, reluctant to intervene, or outright dismissive of the targets' fears. Similarly, courts struggle with the jurisprudential ramifications of threats that are increasingly anonymous, international, multi-actor, and issued with the variety and volume made possible by modern social media and communication platforms. In addition to undermining community trust and causing the justice system to appear anachronistic, weak responses to online crimes potentially increase risk and harm, as targets perceive themselves as undeserving of protection, solely responsible for their own safety, and seek to neutralise threats by their own means. This presentation examines the strengths and shortfalls of existing legal provisions in Australia for addressing online targeted violence, and proposes realistic changes to improve outcomes for targets of online aggression.
  2. Hashtag, You're It: Clinician's guide to understanding online interpersonal violence [with Dr Davis & Dr Sheridan]
    Hashtag, You're It: Clinician's guide to understanding online interpersonal violence [with Dr Davis & Dr Sheridan]
    Recent decades have seen the internet utilised in virtually every facet of life. Indeed, the omnipresence of the internet has greatly transformed the way we live. However, and perhaps unsurprisingly, such ubiquity has also been accompanied by new on-line variants of criminal behaviour. Stalkers, threateners and sex offenders in particular have embraced the internet age with considerable zeal in order to facilitate crimes of targeted violence, especially those involving the young and vulnerable. As such, those working in the field of forensic mental health are now frequently faced with the task of assessing or treating offenders who have committed some, or maybe even all, of their criminal behaviour on-line. It is important for clinicians to be cognisant of the available knowledge base when accepting such referrals. This workshop will provide an overview of on-line interpersonal offences. Several varieties of this behaviour will be explored, including the collection and production of child exploitation material, stalking and harassment through social media, and the use of "revenge porn" and sexualised threats. The overlap between such activity and more traditional forms of contact offending and threatening behaviour will also be discussed, along with an outline of the difficulties clinicians face when asked to opine on whether on-line offending may progress to contact offending. Furthermore, practical recommendations for those involved in the assessment and treatment of internet offenders will be provided, with an emphasis on the diagnosis of paraphilic or delusional disorders and the assessment of risk. Future directions for research and practice will also be discussed.

2017

2017