First Aid Certification – Saving People with Mental Illness or Depression

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Research shows that majority of people who committing suicide suffer from one form of mental illness or depression or the other. Suicide is one of the three major causes of death among people from teenage age to middle age. There is a good chance that you might have or will encounter someone close to you like a family member, friend, colleague or neighbour experiencing emotional or mental crisis; it sure will be nice to able to help them. The Mental Health First Aid Certification teaches interested student how to prevent mentally ill and depressed individual from committing suicide.

We might have seen someone trying to commit this horrifying and yet pathetic act at least once and might have taught it will be nice to be able to change the mind of the individual before he or she goes through it. The mental health First Aid certification trains you to help a person in an emergency situation of mental crisis and substance use disorders until the individual can be attended to by a medical professional.

• Basics of Mental Health and Mental illness

From research one out of four adults and 1 out of 5 children has mental disorder. If the illness is not treated on time which is usually the case it might lead to serious mental crisis. The sad thing about this illness is no one wants to admit to have the illness hence they do not go for the treatment on time. It usually leads to serious consequences like: suicidal thoughts and behaviors, panic attacks, drug overdose and traumatic events.

There are a few basic techniques that are taught in the First Aid Certification Course for Mental illness to help victims of this illness; it is called the Action Plan.

1. Assess the risk of the individual committing suicide or harm to himself or herself
2. Try to be a good listener and do not be judgmental
3. Give the individual reassurance and hopeful information
4. Give the individual encouragement to get the right professional help
5. Give the individual self-help strategies

All these techniques give the victim a reason to continue living, value his or her live and to pursue their dreams in live.

• Types of Mental illnesses and Symptoms

It might very tricky to identify mental illness of someone close to you at an early stage, mostly because the victim would try to do anything to hide it from you. Meanwhile, identifying it at the early stage is very important as it

is the best time to treat the illness. Nonetheless, there are few things you might want to be aware of.

1. Mood Disorder: Usually, the symptoms are depressed most of the time, feeling sad and not wanting to socialize.
2. Anxiety Disorder: Generally, the symptom is excessiveness, irrational fear and dread.
3. Psychosis: Symptoms is hallucination or delusion.

There are several reasons, symptoms and causes of this illness but the good thing is the First Aid Certification course teaches how to identify a mental health emergency and identify symptoms of mental illness and to be an effective responder to these situations.