Mental health first aid

Coming up this morning, find out how I got on when I became a mental health first aider.

I'll be chatting to Donal Scanlon, who is the head of Mental Health First Aid Ireland.

And I'll also be joined by performance nutritionist Daniel Davey to talk about the dangers of turning to AI for health advice and meal plans.

So what kind of a health and wellness week did I have? Well there has been a lot going on.

I was in Puglia for a few days to celebrate my mother-in-law's 70th.

We got caught up in the air traffic control stuff so we had a cancelled flight but we did manage to get out the following morning and had a lovely few days.

I would highly recommend that gorgeous part of the world and I came in then on a late flight and went straight into two days training with Mental Health First Aid Ireland.

More on this a little later in the show.

So.

you know, as far as a safety professional, I think we can prepare ourselves by doing like a mental health first aid course, right? Which basically covers, you know, several steps, but, you know, ask if people are okay on a regular basis, listen to them and connect them, right? So get those things in your toolbox before stuff like this happens, right? Know where to point people, you know, and, and, you know, one of the things that I think a lot of people, it feels intuitive to say, I won't tell anybody, right? But this is one of those things where you have to tell somebody, right? So don't promise you're not going to tell anybody because it's really important that you do.

And then, you know, follow up.

Follow up.

Well, James, I hope people take some time and avail themselves of all the things that are out there during this month.

Right.

Look up your local mental health first aider course.

I know a lot of construction companies actually present this to their employees now.

But there's quite a few resources out there that can help individuals in crisis, but also can help train the trainer in a sense of getting you comfortable talking about these topics and then being a resource for, you know, either your workforce or your community at large.

I've included some links in the show notes for all y'all just in case, but some national resources that come to mind that also some of these have local chapters are mental health first aid.

So they offer training on how to support and talk about mental health and substance use struggles and help respond to those challenges.

NAMI or the National Alliance on Mental Illness offers more of a support group or peer-led approach to those same concerns.

She did the eight-day intensive training.

She's done the Mental Health First Aid instructor training, both for young people and adults, and she's just recently completed the Suicide First Aid training, and she's now running, um, online free courses.

So any of our listeners would be able to sign up to Michelle's courses.

There, there's a half-day course and a full-day course.

And really, I can- couldn't find anybody that was even doing it in adjacent fields or d- you know, making a dent other than there's some clinicians out there that have some training programs.

And we had, what, QPR and VITAL Cog and Mental Health First Aid.

But-

Mm-hmm

No it really is and I think you know it is a very scary conversation for people to have and I think in all things mental health and particularly with suicide you know silence is not your friend and I think it is about actually speaking up and having Often that very challenging and very courageous conversation, either asking people how they really are or people asking for help, people being able to put up their hands and say, I'm struggling.

And knowing that somebody can hear that, because I think, you know, when you look even at Mental Health First Aid, which has been around now for a number of years and is hugely successful and has been rolled out all over the country and you know, different organizations, companies everywhere.

It is about that conversation.

It's about knowing how to listen as well, because listening is as important as talking.

So that's a great way is modeling the behavior and getting them to share their own stories.

But the other side of that is then appealing to the real ROI that there are dollars and cents associated with training on this conversation.

And that's statistically that someone who's experiencing depression actually misses about 30 days a year from work.

And then there's another 27 of unproductivity or presenteeism where they're showing up for the job.

So sometimes it has to be about ROI.

And then explaining that for every $1 that's invested in mental health, there's as much as an $8 to sometimes $30 ROI on that.

And that really makes a difference if we're training this.

And then the final thing I'll say about this, and I could talk for hours on it, is that we actually train almost everyone in this industry on CPR.

Virginia Scully is the founder of Humankind Collective.

Virginia's ex-agency people and culture director and now focused on psychosocial safety, mental health first aid training and making sure that companies are doing the right thing by their people.

But I guess probably one of the most exciting things to be able to get from you today is kind of what are the conversations that we're going to be having or that people are having behind closed doors and what's going on? Obviously without naming names, but being able to give a little bit of an undercurrent of where we think the vibe is around mental wellbeing at the moment in the industry.

So thank you for joining us.

There is this element of like I'd see it, I'd know it, you know, I'd notice changes in.

And, yeah, there are cues.

Like we do learn a lot of that in mental health first aid and in psychosocial training.

You know, there are ways that you can see shifts in behaviour, performance, You know, those metrics are kind of ways into understanding.