COVID 19 has increased workplace stress. This is bad news because stress is hazardous to both the employee's mental health and the health of the organization as a whole. Healthy people make healthy organizations. So, having people handy to provide mental health first aid is now a real asset.

One problem with stress is that, over a prolonged period, it puts strain on our long-term mental health and emotional well-being. If unaddressed, it leads to serious mental health issues such as depression, chronic anxiety disorders, and even psychosis.

However, in addition to the human cost, stress and poor mental health also add significant costs to the 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.

As a mental health first aider, you will help normalize conversations around mental health in the workplace and prevent potentially difficult situations from getting worse. 

What will you learn in this course?

• Advice, tools, and techniques to provide timely help with stress, emotional distress, and mild to moderate mental health problems such as depression and chronic anxiety.
• An understanding of the risk factors that create mental illness and how to spot the signs of mental health problems.
• An up-to-date understanding of the 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 ease someone out of a panic or anxiety attack.
• The understanding to help prevent distress from becoming a more serious mental health problem.
• Key stress prevention strategies improve the well-being of the individual and 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 management develop a positive work culture that will ease workplace stress and incidentally stimulate more productive working.

The course content is based upon the Human Givens school of psychotherapy, which provides 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.

This success is based on an understanding that we all come into life with a common biological inheritance in the form of innate physical and emotional needs. These innate needs seek their fulfillment through interaction with our environment as well as through exploiting those innate resources that nature also 'gave' us. These ‘givens’ (our needs and innate resources) are nature’s genetic endowment having evolved over millions of years. And we all have these givens regardless of our respective cultural or racial background. Being able to identify someone's unfulfilled needs is often the key to finding surprisingly quick relief for their symptoms.

Along with the powerful organizing idea of ‘given’ needs and resources, this course also utilizes recent scientific knowledge about:

• The physiological process is called the stress response,
• 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 behavior, 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

Who should take this course?

Excellent content - so useful for any manager or HR practitioner. This course is ideal as a refresher for those who may have taken a mental health first aid or psychology-based course before, as there is a wealth of new knowledge and understanding emerging from modern neuroscience and psychology.

 There is a huge amount of material in here” Head of the 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)