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It's a job.

There is a discussion of suicide in this comment a bit later on, just so you aware.

Anyway, for the purposes of her job, a crisis lasts 2 weeks. After that point, a person just gets used to whatever their new situation is. They adapt.

What characterizes a crisis, here, is a loss of stability, which indicates either an increased uncertainty of the outcome in a general sense, or an increased likelihood of a specifically undesirable outcome from the perspective of things that we, or that person, might value. So either an actual loss, which causes instability, or a projected future loss which would drastically reduce quality of life. Or both! Think of a sudden loss of income, which might mean a person can project that they won't be able to pay rent, and will lose their shelter as a result.

The use of the word "crisis" to mean "bad situation" is a definition drift that depletes the term of its analytic value. So, for instance, the opioids epidemic in North America is exactly that, an epidemic, and not a crisis. The word "epidemic" means a widespread disease that affects many individuals in a population. It is also normal. I suppose a crisis might last longer than 2 weeks when we're talking about society, but I am pretty damn certain that society has adapted to this thing at this point, and the term "crisis" does not shed any light in the situation in a way that is superior to the more precise term "epidemic". Even from the perspective of sloganeering, rhetorical moves to mobilize populations, and so on, I don't imagine that the overused term "crisis" has any more punch than "epidemic". When you're trying to come up with anti-capitalist slogans, it's even worse, because it's clichéd. (The slogan "capitalism is the crisis" perhaps made sense in 2008 and 2009, as an immediate response to ongoing events in the financial world that were described, understandably, as a crisis. It doesn't make any sense right now.)

THE QUESTIONS.
1. Should anarchists intervene in a crisis? Well, it depends on the kind of crisis. It'd be nice if anarchists intervened in folks' personal crises, if they actually had something to contribute. If the crisis is for people who suck, though, then no - let that crisis happen.

2. Is that even a useful category for thinking about problems? Yes, if the problems are crises, i.e. temporally limited situations in which a stable system has lost its stability, and not simply perenially bad situations that we are calling crises because our lexicon is too loosy-goosy.

3. What are better or worse ways you've seen this done? A better way, in the sense that it was cool, is when I was 15 and my friend threw the frisbee into the creek but I dived in and caught it before it went too far downstream. A worse way is when a friend of mine was left by his girlfriend and he was threatening suicide and we considered it pretty credible and so a few of us went along with the ex-girlfriend's plan of kidnapping him so that we could admit him to a psych ward (that was problematic of us) and fortunately we didn't quite get to the point of institutionalizing our friend but he was pretty upset with us all and he killed himself a few weeks later anyway.