Become a mental health first aider
What you'll learn
- Provide rapid relief to someone in distress and so prevent a more serious condition arising
- How the stress response can translate into mental health issues and how knowing this is therapeutic
- Identify the causes of stress in the work place and learn the key factors that develop a positive work culture
- Help someone come out of a panic attack quickly and prevent them experiencing one in the future
- Use the understanding of the twelve emotional needs to help lift anxiety and depression
- language skills to help someone overcome blocks to utilising their own innate resources
- Deflect destructive language and instead use new language skills to stimulate positive change
- Normalise conversations about mental health so as to encourage positive change in the workplace
- Simple relaxation techniques to prevent stressed thinking and behaviour
- Dispel nine harmful myths about mental health and psychotherapy that create confusion, doubt and resistance to change
Requirements
- No prior knowledge or training is necessary, just a natural empathy for those around you and a sincere willingness to help others under stress or in distress.
- For those with existing knowledge this course is also helpful as refresher. Usefully, there are many new aspects of mental health first aid that you may not have found elsewhere.
Description
Just like physical first aid, timely competent help from a mental health first aider can really prevent more serious problems developing. This is a much needed skill as the mounting stress in so many people’s lives is harming our individual and collective mental health as well as our physical well-being and economic prosperity. So, this first aid course is designed for you to be able to first explain to a friend or colleague exactly what is going on in their mind and secondly, and even more important, the training will help you alleviate their immediate sense of chaos, confusion, isolation and fear.
Timely intervention with mental health first aid can literally help turn someone’s life around.
In addition to human suffering, stress and poor mental health also adds significant costs to any organization. Consequently, we see these extra costs in terms of lower productivity, employee disengagement, more accidents, mistakes, absenteeism, a decline in creative problem solving, loss of talented staff and more. In this respect applying the practical mental health first aid tips you will acquire from this course will reap dividends in terms of cost savings and enhanced people performance.
Twelve learning points
As a mental health first aider, you will be able to lead and normalize conversations around mental health. The simple skills on this course can literally put a smile back on someone’s face and so prevent a difficult situation getting worse. The most important major learning points are:
Advice, tools and techniques to provide timely help with stress, burnout, emotional distress and mild to moderate mental health problems.
An understanding of the risk factors that create mental health problems and how to spot the symptoms.
The biological mechanics of stress and how long-term stress leads to both mental and physical ill-health.
A working understanding of common mental health issues and stressors.
How to quickly calm someone down and get them back into their rational brain.
How to ease someone out of a panic or anxiety attack and prevent it occurring again.
Help someone identify key stressors in their life and deal with them.
How to help prevent distress becoming a more serious mental health problem.
Key stress prevention strategies that improve well-being for the individual and so automatically improve their productivity and performance at work.
Guidance on how to support someone who needs to seek professional help.
The ability to communicate mental health concerns to appropriate managers.
Ways to help develop a positive work culture that will ease workplace stress and incidentally stimulate more productive working.
And a lot more that will help you make someone’s day.
The course content is based upon the Human Givens school of psychotherapy which comprises powerful science-based treatments that routinely provide rapid and sustainable relief for mental distress and illnesses. These include chronic anxiety and anger, depression, PTSD, phobias, psychosis, schizophrenia and addiction.
As such, this course utilizes recent scientific knowledge about:
· The physiological process called the stress response,
· The role our innate physical and emotional needs play in triggering stress,
· How innate physical and emotional needs help maintain health and mental well-being,
· How identifying someone’s unfulfilled needs can lift a variety of symptoms quickly,
· The stress continuum and its role in the onset of mental ill-health,
· The different functions of the brain’s hemispheres,
· The cycle of depression and how to break out of it quickly,
· The role of the dopamine system – nature’s reward system, in maintaining balance,
· The role of trance in learning, human behaviour, and problematic states,
· How the dream state de-arouses the day times’ stressful stimuli,
· How your imagination can both create and help solve psychological problems,
· How the ‘observing self’ separates someone’s problem from their core identity,
· How the healing response comprises a rich system of mind-body interaction,
· The role of ultradian rhythms in making internal mental & physical repairs,
“Really excellent content - so useful for any manager or HR practitioner. There is a huge amount of material in here” Head of workforce transformation at an NHS Trust
"One of the best seminars/ workshops I have attended, ten out of ten!" – Training and education officer (Social Services)
Who this course is for:
- As a mental health first aider you can provide peer to peer first response to a colleague or friend who may be showing signs of distress.
- The COVID pandemic has increased the importance of mental health first aid for line managers, HR managers, supervisors, and team leaders.
- This course is a useful refresher if you have already taken first aid training in mental health, as there is much NEW knowledge that you may not have found elsewhere.
Instructor
- 4.5 Instructor Rating
- 387 Reviews
- 1,347 Students
- 1 Course
Jeremy Old has thirty years experience as an independent management psychologist, psychotherapist and management coach. He created his two powerful training courses because he has discovered, that intervention at a mental health level often results in massive changes in both individual and group performance.
He now realizes that ultimately "only healthy people can make healthy organizations". This realization has led him to focus more and more on the mental health of people in organizational settings and also the multiple factors that get in the way of people experiencing ‘productive well-being’ (happiness) at work.
In both his management work and psychotherapy, Jeremy uses the powerful ‘Human Givens’ approach to psychotherapy. The reason being that he finds the methods routinely relieve people, in one or two sessions. And this means relief from a range of disorders including depression, phobias, panic attacks, PTSD, chronic anxiety, and anger. “I really get a sense that I am helping someone when I can apply this simple knowledge and some simple techniques and see the light come back in their lives after only one session. Such knowledge is transformational and yet easy to both understand and apply.”
Apart from a Masters degree in management, Jeremy is also author of the acclaimed book ‘Reinventing management thinking – Using science to liberate the human spirit’ . His book explains the role that stress plays in undermining organizational productivity and performance and the value of humanizing the workplace. His research reveals how, by aligning work practices and management structures with how people's brains actually work, managers can make serious performance improvements. And that this can be done by simple adjustments to management style, operational structures and decision-making.