What will MHFA teach me?

The Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) will teach you the skills to be able to recognise a person’s poor mental health and about particular mental illnesses. You will learn about:

• Depression

• Anxiety

• Psychosis

• Substance use issues

• Eating disorders

• Mental health in the community and Australia.

The skills learned in this course will give you a strong understanding of these conditions and arm you with the tools to be able to provide acute care for a person suffering from these illnesses. You may be faced with situations in your workplace, community or immediate environment, that will include a person suffering from a mental illness. So it is important to understand why the person may be this way and what you can do to assist them. And remember, this isn’t to fix their issue or illness, it is to provide an emergency response to their current situation until further help can be sought, just as we do with First Aid when someone is sick or injured.

Only 3-4 million people in Australia are an accredited Mental Health First Aider, meaning there is room to expand this knowledge to people who will come in contact with it in the future. The more knowledge we all have the better we can respond to the current Mental Health challenges presented to us.