Last week Grey Matters founder and co-editor, Ifeyinwa, completed her training to become a mental health first aider. She tells us more about the course:
Learning first aid is always something I’ve wanted to do and last week I finally attended a first aid course. But two days of training and I still have no idea how to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. That wasn’t covered by the course. I didn’t learn how to put someone in the recovery position, how to carry out mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or how to properly perform chest compressions. In fact, in most situations that you’ll think of where you need a first-aider, I’m still just as useless as I was before the course. But that’s because when you think of first aid, you think of someone who is showing physical signs of needing help: they’ve fainted, they’re bleeding, they’re choking. As I said, in all these situations I’m no good. But if someone is having a panic attack, if someone is suicidal or if they are in the midst of a psychotic episode, thanks to the mental health first aid (MHFA) training course I attended, I now know how to provide initial help.
MHFA is a relatively new concept. It was developed in Australia in 2000 and came to England in 2007. I hadn’t even heard of it until last year when a friend shared this Polygeia article on Facebook. But after last week’s course I’m now its biggest advocate.
The idea of mental health first aid is bewildering to some. How can you have first aid for mental health? Well, quite easily when you think about what first aid really means. First aid is the help given to any injured person before medical treatment can be obtained. To translate that into a mental health context, it simply means the help given to anybody experiencing a mental health problem before professional help can be obtained. Given the growing prevalence of mental health problems and the delay in people seeking help, many of us find ourselves in a situation where we need to help someone with a mental health issue. Sadly, some of us don’t even recognise the occasion when it arises and for those of us who do, we probably don’t know what to do or say. That is a dangerous reality but mental health first aid training can change it. With 25% of people in the UK experiencing some form of mental health problem in any given year, wouldn’t it be great if the other 75% of us were first aid trained to support them as signs started to appear? I wonder what difference that would make to mental health statistics.
To clarify, a mental health first aid course does not make you a therapist nor does it qualify you to diagnose people. Its focus is first aid and the premise of any first aid is to preserve life, to prevent deterioration of any injury or illness, to promote healing and recovery, to provide comfort to the ill or injured. MHFA teaches you how to do all that when dealing with someone experiencing a mental health problem. It all comes down to ALGEE.
Assess risk of suicide or self-harm
Listen non-judgementally
Give reassurance and information
Encourage the person to get appropriate professional help
Encourage self-help strategies
But ALGEE wasn’t the only take-away from the course. Below are five important lessons that we all need to learn:
- Mental health and mental illness are not the same thing. If you’re somebody that uses the terms interchangeably then click here.
- It is a myth that people who talk about suicide do not carry out their threats. Take their words seriously.
- Self-harm is not just cutting. It takes on various forms, including excessive drinking or risky sexual behaviour.
- People can, and do, recover from even the most severe mental health problems.
- Phone down, laptop off, and listen non-judgementally. (Ok, so technically it’s part of ALGEE but it is that important it needed to be repeated.)
It’s not a cheap course, and hopefully in time we’ll see more government subsidies for it, but if you can get yourself onto a MHFA course, do. It’s no exaggeration to say that what you learn could help save someone’s life.
For more information on mental health first aid training go to: http://mhfaengland.org/
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