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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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,
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!
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’.
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…
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…
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.
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.
The 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.