Mental Health First Aid: A Necessary Skill for Any Adult Who Interacts with Young People
Dr. Judith Allen first learned about Mental Health First Aid a decade ago. She was attending a behavioral health event in D.C., collecting professional development hours and renewing certifications, but what caught her attention was the Mental Health First Aid booth.
An Australian initiative created in 2001 by a nurse and mental health literacy professor, Mental Health First Aid empowers adults to recognize when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis — and it gives them the tools they need to support, triage, and connect that person to help if warranted.
For Dr. Allen, the program responded to a clear need. Most people knew how to respond when someone was having a heart attack or at least knew how to call for help. But most could not recognize when someone was struggling mentally, let alone feel confident enough to sound the alarm.
Dr. Allen became certified in Mental Health First Aid and then became a Mental Health First Aid trainer. After successfully completing the course, she returned to her organization — Communities In Schools (CIS) of the Dallas Region — to teach the course, at a time when school shootings, depression, and parenting challenges gained deafening traction in her local community.
Before long, it was organizational policy at CIS of the Dallas Region that the entire team be certified in the practice and “see something, say something” when a potential mental health challenge presented itself.
Empowering School-based Staff and Increasing School Safety
With the certification, the team of CIS school-based staff were better empowered to purposefully intervene. To reach critical mass, though, CIS extended the training to the community and invited parents, teachers, coaches, and partner providers to participate. An uptick in school shootings had created urgency for schools, legislators, and organizations like CIS to reach a young person in crisis before they harmed themselves or others.
In November 2015, the Texas House of Representatives appointed a select committee on mental health to study the issue and make recommendations. And in 2019, the Texas Education Agency established a new rule requiring each school district employee who regularly interacts with students to complete mental health training. CIS was one of several service providers invited to testify before the House of Representatives.
Supporting Young People with Mental Health Challenges on the Rise
In 2019, Dr. Allen brought her clinical and leadership experience to Communities In Schools (CIS) of Chicago, where she serves as Chief Operating Officer and Clinical Director. In Chicago, a three-year grant from the O’Shaughnessy Foundation funded the critical launch of the Youth Mental Health First Aid school and community initiative “Safety Net.”
The project’s launch coincided with concerning youth mental health trends happening nationwide. National surveys revealed that from 2009 to 2019 the proportion of high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness had increased by 40 percent. Those seriously considering suicide had increased by 36 percent, and those creating a suicide plan had increased by 44 percent.
The pandemic’s blow in 2020 only exacerbated the issue, as many young people were experiencing feelings of isolation and anxiety. In 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on protecting youth mental health, and one of the advisory’s recommendations for family members, caregivers, and educators was to learn how to recognize the warning signs of mental health distress, a key outcome of Mental Health First Aid.
Since COVID, youth mental health has remained a constant area of support for Chicago schools and the organizations that support them. Just last school year, CIS of Chicago school-based clinicians saw behavioral health needs increase by more than 40 percent in partner schools compared with the previous school year.
Building Positive Relationships: The First Step in This Work
For CIS of Chicago, the foundation of Youth Mental Health First Aid is the intersection of caring adult and child in need of help. You don’t have to be a clinician or a professional to take the course. It’s designed for any adult that interacts with children; all it takes is having the relationship to sense when something is off kilter.
By offering the course to a wide array of adults, CIS of Chicago aims to create a safety net around the lives of Chicagoans so that everyone has access to the resources they need to thrive. The beauty of the training, Dr. Allen said, is that certified adults are then able to recognize when other adults are struggling mentally as well.
The idea of “see something, say something” can be a daunting one. We often avoid interaction, minimize clues that our intuitional alarms or hope someone else will catch it and step in. The more individuals that are trained, the more support that we as a community can provide to each other. And this support is not just a “nice-to-have,” it’s a necessary skill in this world where suffering too often happens in private until it’s too late. Our collective trauma requires projects like this to help us heal with empathic skill, compassion, and purpose.
Since 2019, CIS of Chicago’s team has trained more than 1,000 teachers, community members, program managers, and its entire team of CIS staff members in Youth Mental Health First Aid, and the team is looking to expand trainings in the coming years. A total of five CIS team members are Mental Health First Aid trainers.
CIS invites all Chicagoans to explore becoming certified in Youth Mental Health First Aid at https://www.cisofchicago.org/mhfa/.
ABOUT COMMUNITIES IN SCHOOLS OF CHICAGO:
Since 1988, Communities In Schools (CIS) of Chicago has empowered the city’s young people to stay in school and achieve in life. CIS of Chicago is present in more than a third of Chicago public schools, connecting essential programs and resources and providing tailored, one-on-one guidance to students who need it most.
Each year, tens of thousands of Chicago’s public-school students benefit from the work of CIS of Chicago. Of the students who received intensive support, 99% of seniors graduated on time, 99% of K-11 students were promoted to the next grade, and fewer than 1% dropped out. To learn more about CIS of Chicago, please visit cisofchicago.org.
