Postponing service past the moment of crisis destroys the therapeutic opening it created.

Evidence

In any event, the day a client appears to seek assistance may be the day when he or she is most open to help or the street-level bureaucrat is most likely to be able to intervene successfully. … It is obvious that the disequilibrium created by a crisis is a powerful therapeutic tool that is lost if the situation is allowed to degenerate, through postponement, into a chronic, long-term problem. 23 Similar to the queue by appointment is the waiting list; clients are asked to wait for what is usually an undetermined amount of time until they can be accommodated. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 702

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the crisis window — how bureaucratic delay converts acute, treatable problems into chronic ones, and how that degeneration then justifies staff’s cynical view of clients.
• XREF: Connects to social-work crisis-intervention theory (Reissman) cited here, and to the reader’s interest in how routinization outpaces narrative change.