At the same time, the scientific critique of debriefing has begun to have an impact.
The Little Fool had done a lot of debriefing on this subject.
The absence of debriefing after a violent incident contributed to prolonged sick leave in a respected member of staff".
Before they go home to the more tumultuous salute being planned for Saturday at their base, Whidbey Island, near Seattle, they face two long days of debriefing interviews.
At the time, the former colonel, George Trofimoff, was the civilian head of an Army intelligence center in Nuremberg, Germany, in charge of debriefing defectors and refugees.
He agreed to a sentence of time served, with no probation, and to undergo 60 hours of debriefing, under oath, by the government.
Dr. Grist also said 11 studies of debriefing techniques, analyzed in a report this year in The Cochrane Library, a publication devoted to evidence-based medicine, found that some types of debriefing techniques were either ineffective in preventing the more serious symptoms or actually appeared to increase the risk.
Dr. McNally said there were conflicting studies of the effectiveness of debriefing -- single sessions soon after an event in which trauma survivors are asked to express their feelings and told what psychological symptoms they might experience.
According to Gist, meta-analyses of debriefing procedures, a subset of trauma work that encourages catharsis through talk, simply do not support the efficacy of many of the interventions.
Malachy Corrigan, the director of the Counseling Service Unit of the New York City Fire Department, was once a proponent of debriefing — but months before the September 11th attacks he decided that it was generally not a beneficial technique.
Israeli intelligence officials are planning to wait for at least several days before beginning the delicate process of debriefing Gilad Shalit on his five years and four months in captivity in Gaza at the hands of Palestinian militants.
