Category Archives: self harm

Reacting to self harm

It’s easy to become emotionally disturbed when faced with a service-user, patient or client who self harms. Workers feel bad for the patient and bad about themselves for not being able to prevent it.

Unfortunately this emotional response – an element of High Expressed Emotion (HEE) known as Emotional over-involvement can make things worse. Try this instead.

Upcoming online seminars

Do you work in mental health or are you keen to know more for another reason? Are you frustrated at not being able to get on group training without travelling miles and paying through the nose? Look no further.

If you have an hour to spare and access to a pc or mobile ‘phone then you can join our 1 hour seminars with an experienced mental health nurse and trainer. For just £12.50 you can have a PDF booklet and access to an online presentation and question and answer session from the comfort of your own home.

Mental health and disorder made easy

Upcoming sessions include…

Thursday February 23rd 2023  The picture on the box

Thursday March 2nd 2023  Psychosis and schizophrenia

Thursday March 9th 2023 Self harm

All sessions begin at 7pm.

Fill in the contact form below to reserve your place on any or all of the sessions listed.

Online video training

“Very thorough and high quality…” Abi, Student nurse

Lifetime access for only £30.00

Do you work in mental health services?

Are you a support worker, student nurse or just an interested person who’d like to know how to make more sense of mental health and disorder?

Do you find it hard to see how all the different disorders and peoples’ approaches to them fit together?

Do you have difficulty getting other professionals to see things as you do?

Would you like to be more effective in working with the people you care for?

Then this online video course is for you.

Picture on the box workbook: title page

People learn best when they have questions and they remember best when they have a ‘schema’, a ‘picture on the box’ to help make sense of what they’re taught. That’s what this training is all about. Over two and a half hours of video instruction alongside a range of information and exercises in the accompanying workbook help you to make sense of the seemingly overwhelming field of mental health and disorder.

And all for much less than the cost of a good night out.

Picture on the box workbook: Sample page (psychosis 1)

You can have all this for less than you’d pay for a take-away meal for two. But unlike a take-away, the benefits of this training will last your entire career.

Click the link below to get full access to the course videos and workbook.

https://www.tamtalking.co.uk/p/onlive-video-training-the-picture-on-the-box/

Webinar: Mental health recovery

What’s #recovery really about in #mentalhealth? For many it means so much more than a return to how we were. Join my one hour seminar to learn more.

https://tinyurl.com/recoversemi

Self harm interactive webinar

Wednesday March 24th 2021 7pm

Self-harm can be confusing and bewildering for both staff and service-users. Ideas about ‘manipulation’ or a ‘cry for help’ do little or nothing to help prevent future self-harm. This interactive webinar explores some alternative notions and examines ways that support workers can make a difference in a genuinely difficult situation.

Click here to book your place

There is a great deal that support workers and others can do to help people who harm themselves. The trick is to be able to see past the behaviour and to understand the person who cuts themselves, takes overdoses or otherwise injures themselves.

In the past this sort of behaviour has been written off as attention-seeking or as an attempt to manipulate workers and yet most self-harm happens in secret and never comes to the attention of the staff. It’s really not about us. Something else is going on and the tired old notion that it is merely ‘behavioural’ is both meaningless and irrelevant in a modern context of deliberate self-harm.

This interactive webinar covers:

Definitions of self-harm

A cry for help?

Is it all just attention-seeking?

Self-harm and suicide – are they linked?

Pain, the brain and self-soothing behaviours

The emotional purpose of self-harm

Helping people to ‘get past’ self-harm

Managing the risks

Dos and Don’ts

Click here to reserve your place on this interactive webinar

Please note – this is an educational seminar. It is not a group therapy session and we cannot make time for individual or group counselling or other intervention here,

The picture on the box

Making sense of mental health

Mental health work needn’t drive you up the wall!

Mental health work can seem so complicated… and not just for beginners. Many seasoned practitioners go on for years without a clear idea of how the different diagnoses, conditions and coping strategies fit together. It’s like trying to make sense of a 1,000 piece jigsaw without any real idea of what the overall picture is supposed to look like.

The confusion that arises can lead to workplace stress, unclear aims and difficulties in following care plans with different workers pulling in different directions whilst the service-user or client gets stuck in the middle of a whirlpool of confusion.

It’s always better when you can see the whole picture

This course is intended to provide the ‘picture on the box’. It shows clearly and simply exactly how the different types of diagnosis and conditions fit together and even maintain and exacerbate each other. Delivered either online or face to face (with appropriate distancing, of course) it’s available to staff teams anywhere in the world, just so long as they speak English and have a working internet connection.

The course involves…

Session 1

Anxiety (the gateway to mental disorder)

Freeze, flight and fight

Session 2

Depression (when you’re tired of trying)The opposite of the FIVE ‘F’S             

Psychosis (The Devil makes work for idle hands)

Session 3

Personality disorder (9 statements of vulnerability)

The symptom groups – are the same as the 3 clusters… are the same as the vulnerabilities    

3 models – All roads lead to the same destination   

Session 4

Dependence and self-reliance        

Therapeutic optimism Expressed emotion

Get in touch to book this training for your own staff. Go on, you know you want to!

Self-harm parents

It’s unfair and inaccurate to pretend that all parents of people who harm themselves are to blame. There are parents who treat their children in horrendous ways and who really do cause long term mental health problems. But they are not the norm.
Most parents, although fallible like everyone else, are ‘good enough’.

Mental health training – a short sample

This abridged, edited audio (& video slideshow) is taken from the introductory session of a 2012 mental health training day in Glasgow. Although not all of the session is included it gives a flavour of the day, the topics to be considered, the training aims and the insights to be expected throughout the day.

You can find a longer version (26 minutes) by clicking below…

Training courses

Complete the contact form below to arrange training for your staff.

Social and mental health care training

I’ve been getting a lot of new inquiries lately, which is wonderful. It seems that training budgets are becoming available to the small specialist trainers again without organisations having to rely upon the off-the-shelf generalists on their ‘pre-approved supplier lists’. There are many courses that only a specialist clinician can provide. Click below to download the Mind The Care brochure…

170429 Mind The Care brochure.

That’s great news for the little man like me. It means I can get to more organisations and train more staff from the perspective of the expert practitioner. Learning from someone who actually does the job is always better than listening to a training executive with a script.

So I thought I’d put a little post up for those organisations who haven’t experienced my training yet (and it is an experience), outlining my most popular courses and seminar topics and inviting them to get make contact. Just click here and I’ll be in touch to design the exact training or speaking programme you need to help you look after and get the best out of your care team.

Click here 170429 Mind The Care brochure to download Mind the care’s most recent brochure.

courses-meme

Introduction to Self Injury

This 1 day Introduction to self injury training course is only a basic introduction to the topic. It’s intended for social care workers who may or may not have any prior experience of the subject.

working-with-people-who-self-injureThe course challenges the prejudicial myths, value judgements and assumptions that surround self-injury and the people who habitually cut, burn or otherwise harm themselves. It offers practical guidance in working with people who repeatedly harm themselves without getting bogged down in unhelpful criticism and blame.

By comparing self harm to more ‘acceptable’ (but often more harmful) coping strategies like smoking, drinking or general impulsivity we normalise the action as a means of self-soothing before extending the comparison to less dramatic strategies like walking, bathing or even just watching a favourite film.

The aim is not to make participants experts. Rather the course is intended to remove prejudices and offer a simple explanatory model that isn’t based upon value judgements or unsupportable assumptions about manipulation or attention-seeking.

Click here to discover more about how Mind The Care Training can help you and your staff.