Why Mental Health First Aid

The two day mental health first aid course

Comments received about the 2 day mental health first aid course. Eliot Dales is a registered learning disabilities nurse and manager of a residential home for disabled young people.

The course was excellent it exceeded my expectations in every way. I came away more confident about the whole MH issue. It was clear that you know the subject really well. It was good to hear you talk about all of the wider issues and therapies that you obviously have an interest in. I could have stayed for another day and am hungry for more info'.
Thanks and well done.
Eliot

What’s the difference?

What is the difference between a shopper and a shopper-holic. A shopper goes to the shops to buy something they want. The shopper-holic goes to the shops to see if there is anything that they can want to buy. On a biochemical level, the shopper-holic needs a dopamine fix before they get a seratonin boost. Dopamine is the wanting hormone, (the aptly named addiction hormone) seratonin is the blissed out because i got it hormone. Whoever would have thought shopping was so hormonal?

They are all important but

I have been asked what I think are the most important skills when it comes to mental health first aid. It was tempting to say all of them but that would be a very short entry on this blog.

For me, and this is just my opinion two things that I think are essential are spotting things early on and listening skills.

Why? Because I so often see people getting this wrong or struggling with it. OK we all know that it is all too easy to try and say something helpful when you see someone is distress and then get it terribly wrong. We are all only human after all and the intention is often the more comforting part of the message. But when someone is in serious distress often the intentions of others are misread.

OK so spotting things early on, is the 'A' part of A.L.G.E.E. your knowledge of mental health and the risk factors will help you spot things that others might over look. Think of the man in the story below(I think I did OK), how many people might have walked past and not noticed? How long might he have suffered if it were not for the fact that his distress was spotted, by someone with a little know-how?

Then the listening skills, some of you will be tired of hearing this but for some it will be new. Listening is not just about sitting there and hearing what is said. Skilful listening is not a passive state. It is a dynamic expressive state, which requires considerable skill. You may have heard of reflective listening, or empathic listening and on the MHFA course we talk about non-judgemental listening. All these very skilful ways of communicating with an individual have very powerful effects. (See empathy and distress below)

The effects of skilful listening are to make the person being listened to feel understood, accepted, valued and important. Skilful listening reduces distress and brings comfort and makes recovery more likely. Skilful listening is a strangely intangible but wonderfully healing process. When you have been in the presence of a truly skilful listener even when you were not feeling bad you come away feeling better!

Your Votes

In response to the question:- should a relaxation audio track be put on this blog so any one can down load it and use it for free?

Your responses.
Number of votes cast 37 so far, that does not include those of you who voted twice. They were yes votes so thanks but in the interests of accuracy I thought I would only let you vote once

Number of Yes votes 32 = 86.5%

Number of Maybe votes 5 = 13.5%

Number of No votes 0

Thanks for your interest and support hope you had fun voting. I better get to work and figure out how to do this. Keep up the good work.

well done you!

This lady wanted to remain anonymous but I just have to do this. I want to give her a score. A one to ten on an A.L.G.E.E . score. If you want to know what A.L.G.E.E. is then do the course.
For A. I give here 90%
For G. I give here 98%
For L. I give her 80%
For E. I give her 90%
For E. I give her 60%
Over all sore on the ALGEE scale of a possible 500 she scores 418 that’s 84%
For a first go, that is amazing, well done you!
Yes I did check if she was ok with the scoring thing 

I think I did ok

I was leaving work today and I passed a man who was very quiet and seemed to be shivering. The weather had been cold but now it was warmer. I wondered why he was shivering. I went back and talked to him. (engaged in conversation) I simply asked him if he was cold and he said no.
I thought why would someone be shaking like that and breathing how he was. I remembered the mental health first aid course and the panic attacks. He was upright and quite lucid I was sure he wasn’t having a heart attack. I talked to him some more. I noted that he was breathing too fast. He told me that he kept thinking of terrible things that might happen. I was sure he was having an anxiety/panic attack.
I reassured him I reassured him very well, I was sure what was going on, I told him about anxiety and adrenalin and how it can affect the body. We talked and talked. I asked him if he would try the breathing exercise the one armed seagull. He agreed. We did that and we did that for a long time. And we talked after 20 minutes or so of talking and trying to get his breathing normal things improved. I think the talking and distraction along with the breathing worked very well.
After half an hour of so he was much better. I told him that this was very common and that his GP could help. I said he should go and tell his GP about his.
I had to go but told someone near that he had just had a big fright and could do with a friendly ear. When I left him he was chatting to this woman. That is all I did, I think I did ok.

One act of kindness can out weigh a thousand sorrows

I knew of a man that once felt so desperate that he fixed up a noose and stood on a stool, intent on ending his life. Just as he was about to kick the stood from under his feet and end his life, a memory came to him. A memory of when he was a little boy. A memory of his grandmother, he was at the beach, she had gone out of her way to take him there to have fun and from her limited means had bought him a lovely big ice cream. He remembered this; the memory was vivid and real, so much that he could almost taste the ice cream.
At this point he realised that some one really had loved him, that he was worth loving. That he was worth something. He took the noose from his neck and stepped off the stool.
How close was that! How important was that one act of kindness. I wonder if grandma ever knew how important she was.
That man went on to create his own charity for people who feel suicidal, and when I last saw him he was doing fine and had a strong sense of purpose and well-being.
One act of kindness can out weigh a thousand sorrows. Never under estimate the importance of the kind things do you.

Did I say the wrong thing?

Some times we are frightened to say what we are really feeling. We worry that we may say the wrong thing, or what will others think about what we said. But just read the next post, this is I think a magical moment when the feeling was true and the right thing was said.

There is a saying once something is said it can not be unsaid, but I have often heard people say when they are near the end of their lives, that they regret nothing they did only the things they did not do. What do you think?

Kind words are powerful

From a member of staff at Treloar College, thank you for all your kindness.

I helped someone this morning to get up. They said they felt depressed and they are known to be struggling at the moment. I felt this person may feel unloved. I just said that they were a lovely person and that the staff think the world of them, because we all do. There was an immediate lift in their mood; you could tell that I had reached them. I know that it was probably just temporary. Just felt inside it was the right thing to say.

Some thing silly?

Suicide accounts for 1% of all adult deaths, three quarters of these are men. Suicide is a serious public health problem.

One day I was driving home form a long day at work it had been a very noisy 13-hour shift. I pulled into a layby to have 5 minutes peace before I returned to a home full of noisy children.

Within a few minutes a police car pulled up behind me. An officer walked over. After a little small talk he looked at me in a serious way and asked, “you’re not thinking of doing anything silly are you?” No I said wondering what the heck he meant. (Juggling fruit or doing an impression of Tommy Cooper perhaps.) It wasn’t until I was nearly home that it dawned on me what he was asking. He was concerned that I was contemplating suicide.

Later on in my career I found out why Police are worried about men alone in cars in quiet laybys. On more than one occasion I found my self attending the scene of a suicide with the police and collecting a lifeless body form a single parked car.

If you are worried about someone contemplating suicide it is best to come right out and ask directly. Eg “Bob I’m worried about you are you thinking about suicide?”

It leaves no doubt, if Bob is he will probably be relived you noticed and asked. If he wasn’t he will probably just laugh. No harm done.

On the mental health first aid course you will learn which people are most at risk of suicide, what the risk factors are and how to predict the likely hood that some one will attempt suicide. You’ll even know how to help them.

ALGEE

One of the 5 steps of mental health first aid is to Encourage self help strategies; the E in A.L.G.E.E. Thank you Sue for this.


“Just had a student who has found that writing poetry is a great release of his frustrating emotions connected with his disability. He popped in to my classroom, said an idea had come to him, he grabbed a piece of paper and has just returned with a very thoughtful piece of writing. In his words, it helps him unload. I am encouraging him to keep them in a book and may make a great 'Collection' if he chooses”.

Mental Health First Aid Success

My sincere thanks to all the devoted staff of Treloar's who have contributed to this blog and for their care of others. Mental Health First Aid was long over due our thanks and recognition to Betty Kitchener and Prof. Anthony Jorm. My thanks also to my co-trainer Helen Goodenough who's good humour and enthusiasm have given me momentum in this work.

The aims of Mental Health First Aid

What are the aims of Mental Health First Aid?

1. To preserve life where someone is a danger to themselves or others.
2. To provide help in order to prevent mental health problems deteriorating into a more serious state.
3. To promote recovery to a state of good mental health.
4. To provide comfort and reassurance to a person experiencing mental health problems.

If you are interested in becoming a mental health first aider. You can get more information about this on the following link.

http://www.mhfa.org.uk/

Some interesting facts about mental health.

In the UK employers loose over £1000 for every person they employ, through mental ill health.

The total cost to businesses in the UK is £25.9 Billion a year, that’s Billion with a B.

In the UK 70 million sick days a year are lost to mental ill health, things such as depression, anxiety and stress. This could just be the tip of the iceberg how many people phone there employer saying they have a migraine or something too worried about the resulting prejudice if they said they couldn’t come to work because they were too depressed.

It has also been estimated that over £15 billion is lost in productivity due to people who continue to work even though they are suffering form some form of mental health problem.

The good news is mental health problems are like physical health problems, they can be treated and most people recover. We tend to always hear about the worst cases, which does little for the morale of people who are trying to recover.

Derogatory language

Derogatory language about mental health problems makes it much more difficult for people in distress to talk about it. If we use common derogatory terms like ‘nutter’ or ‘weirdo’ it makes it much harder for some one to ask for help.

Early help is one of the key factors in preventing mental illness; and is one of the aims of mental health first aid.

Since many of the staff in our department have done the mental health first aid course. The issue of mental well-being has been discussed much more frequently and openly

Our staff are more vigilant of people who are showing signs of distress or are going through a period when there are more risk factors than usual. For example exam time and moving house coincide with a relationship break-up. We put in the support in advance and I’m sure have steered our students away from more sever distress and even mental illness.

A quick guide to avoiding inappropriate language when speaking about mental illness or distress.

1. Use adjectives rather than nouns.
Eg adjectives like:- Sad, Lonely, Distressed etc.
rather than nouns like nutter, or loony.

2. Refer to a person first rather than label them
Eg Deb with a diagnosis of depression.
Not Deb the depressive.

Or Bill living with schizophrenia
Not Bill the schizophrenic.

Changing our language can change how we think and then how we communicate and then the support people get and then the end results we see. It’s worth the effort.