Mental Health First Aid

This post serves as my reflection to the Mental Health First Aid course that I have been taking.

The first session (Nov 7, 2022)

That is a great session. When I signed up for attendance, I recognized that there is another Vietnamese person enrolled in this course this session. I was so eager to meet her there, but a lot of people came, still couldn’t see her. I thought that she gave up the course, but no :) When we introduced ourself, I finally recognized her. With face mask, it’s pretty hard to recognize people whom I don’t meet for a while, haha.

Btw, go back to the main topic. People who attended the training session are from different background, most from School of Engineering, no one is UG, and 1 of them has .. his own company for nearly 20 years. He is over 40, I think, and currently enrols in MBA program of our university. During the session, the instructor, who has British accent, introduce several concepts of mental health issues, specifically depression for this session, to us. These info are all useful, and I think I already know some of them. The (new/recalled) knowledge that I love the most is the definition of recovery from mental health issue, which is just able to manage our lives again, but no need to get rid of all the problem.

In the last 1 hour of the session, we had a group discussion about the choice of physical and mental health problems. Some of us chose physical, and the old guy was serious to debate about it as if the mental one is recoverable and the physical one is not, what did we choose. Okay, but of course in the real scenarios, we don’t know if we can recover or not, otherwise we don’t mind to choose. Another question raised, as he challenged me if both are not recoverable, that we lose some parts of our body, what should I choose? I said it depended. For me, not to have/losing a thing is still better that we have it but we do not (want to) use, e.g when we are depressed. For other people, they may disagree to me. It’s fine.

The second session (Nov 14, 2022)

To be honest, this session is less interesting than the first session. Maybe there is not much new information, as it but just focus on ALGEE method to first-aid people who has depression. There is a role-play activity, where the instructor acts as a girl just breaking up her boyfriend. I have to say that sitting in the front of the room is an advantage that you don’t have to talk loudly for all class to hear, just need to talk directly to the instructor. Not to mention the feeling that you are really talking to her privately :) So, in the activity, my classmates try to evaluate a person’s risk of suicide, as doing ‘A’ in ALGEE. We ask questions, show our care to the person, so that the person trust us and express their thinking to us. The lesson I solidify is to accept the other’s feelings, not hurry to pull them out of the feelings, and show our care/empathy (but not sympathy) to them.

Later, the intructor introduces professional treatments for depression, including psychological and medical. There are a lot of details that I, as a mental health first-aider, don’t need to remember but encourage the people with mental health issues seek for.

At the end of the session, anxiety problems are briefly introduced. We go through general symptoms, risk factors related to anxiety disorder.

One sided thing I want to tell, I meet the old guy again. We have a short conversation, and I know that he goes back to school in order to … have something to do, as his company doesn’t need his attention then he has lots of free time.

The third session (Nov 21, 2022)

The session is of another level :)) Led by other instructor (male, seem-to-be knowledgable about psychology), the session is almost full of energy. He start the session at elaborating many anxiety problem, including GAD (General Anxiety Disorder), PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), DSM 5, … It wows me! It makes me excited about the information of these problems. These problems originate from misleading belief (GAN, OCD - over-worry) or shocking experience that people afraid of undergoing it again (PTSD). One interesting point is to cure these problems, exposure to the anxiety in a proper and professional setting is a common treatment. Ya, you have to confront the problem to solve it hahaaa :)

Next, we learn about Panic Attack and a simple way to overcome panic attack by control the breath, breathe slowly to avoid hyper-ventilation. The breathing and other relaxing techniques introduced are very similar to ‘mindfulness’ in Buddhism. Talking with the instructor, I learn that ‘mindfulness’ originates from a American Buddhism practitioner, but not the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. Of course, I need to verify this information.

Lastly, the instructor teaches us about Substance Abuse, which is highly related depression. There are a lot of chemicals categorized as drugs, like cocaine, heroin, caffeine … I learn new words like cannabis (cần sa), ecstasys (thuốc lắc), … very useful in the case I want to buy some xD Just kidding! Finally, to help others cure the addiction, we also apply ALGEE, while the addicted needs five stage of changes: precomtemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance. At each stage, we need to encourage them in different way. Don’t tell them it’s bad the the first stage, otherwise “con nghiện sẽ trình bày và không có cách nào cứu chữa” @@.

The fourth (final) session (Nov 28, 2022)

The final session comes. The main topic is psychosis (rối loạn tâm thần, 精神症) and schizophrenia (tâm thần phân liệt, 精神分裂症). First, an instructor from HKU (as I remember) delivered the first part of the session. She told us the definition, common types, risk factor, and symptoms of psychosis. Ya, a lot of information. I was pretty impressed by phenomenon that people with psychosis have to bear, which is the existence of strong, aggressive inner voices (yes, plural!) that make people cannot discriminate these voices from the external sound. The probability to encounter the problem is ~ 10%, which is a significant proportion. Hmm, that means among you there are a lot of people have this problem, but you don’t know because they don’t tell you.

I observed a thing that the instructor is examined :)) I don’t know if this session is a teaching test for her, but it is recorded. Sometimes I looked straight to the camera and made some hand gestures to try noticing people watching the video that I was aware of the situation :D. Btw, the rest was delivered by the instructor in the third session, Dino Wong. OMG, I just search his information and find that, HE IS AN PHD GRADUATE IN CLINIC PSYCHOLOGY! WOWWWW! That’s why he delivered the content so well!

The rest of the session is about how to detect one person with psychosis, which is mainly via behaviors, and the medication. It seems to have many side effects, including appetite increase and constant low mood (as the medicine will deplete? to balance dopamine concentration in brain’s regions). Also, psychosis is usually not curable, and medication can only prevent the problem from becoming more severe. Thus, people with psychosis seem to live the rest of their live with the problem :/ Nonetheless, if they skip the medication, any positive effect will disappear soon, thus the psychosis problem relapses! The more relapsing/time without medication, the more damaged their brains become.

Ending

Thanks for reading this post. I hope that you find this piece of information useful, and you can apply to first help yourself and then other people to overcome psychological problems. In fact two days ago, I tried to help one of my friend who suffers from depression (luckily that friend is already recovering), and another who is in my apartment and suffers from panic-attack like problem (but later he went to hospital and found that the cause should be toxic gases from the moss in his room :)) ). There will be cases that people need help, thus we can help them with what we have prepared. Stay together and stay strong!

I am not sure if I can become a part-time psychology counsellor via email, but if I have time, I would love to help you via email. You can find it in the left side panel of the page.