It’s like a big jigsaw – and it’s easier to understand when you can see the picture on the box!
What: 1 hour online seminar to show how #mentalhealth and disorder fit together When: Thursday 23rd February at 7pm.
Where: Your choice.
Cost: £12.50
Do you work in mental health services?
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 course is for you.
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. Book Stuart for face to face training or access over two and a half hours of video instruction alongside a range of information and exercises in the accompanying workbook. This training will help you to make sense of the seemingly overwhelming field of mental health and disorder.
Click the links below for a taste of what the course entails
The video version of the course is intended for individuals to use, it’s not licensed for groups. Contact us for details using the form below. Make sure you leave your Email address and contact details when you buy and you’ll receive an Email containing the link and password to access the entire course online.
Note: Emails are sent manually and so it may take up to 24 hours (usually much quicker) to receive your link and password.
Enjoy,
Stuart Sorensen
(Nurse, Trainer and Coach)
A short video to accompany Mind The Care Training’s ‘Hanged if you do & hanged if you don’t’ training for health and social care workers. If there’s one thing that unites almost everyone concerned with health and social care services it’s the fear of being sued.
Otherwise rational and courageous workers have been reduced to quivering wrecks at the mere suggestion of litigation or the slightest suggestion that they might have failed in or ‘neglected’ their duty of care.
Duty of care is such a preoccupation for workers that it crops up daily in conversation and in practice whenever we encounter ‘thorny’ issues relating to ‘health and safety’, ‘rights and responsibilities’, ‘freedom of choice’, ‘confidentiality’ and a host of other topics. However not everyone who hears the term understands what it means or indeed where it comes from.
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 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.
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,
If you’re looking to book training for your staff you’ll need to complete the online contact form below.
However, if you’re interested in joining a short, ‘public access’ webinar as an individual or small group of friends, students etc or to set up a TamTalk please visit the TamTalking.co.uk store here
.Whatever you’re looking for, if it’s mental health or social care related get in touch, even if it’s not listed. You’d be surprised at the bespoke products I can put together.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Stuart Sorensen
A 90 minute online webinar, Wednesday 24th February 7pm – 8:30pm
One of the biggest headaches for health and social care workers is how to make sense of their duty of care. On the one hand we’re told that we must take steps to ensure safety and on the other hand we need to respect people’s rights to make their own decisions, even if they’re risky. This can be a delicate balance to strike.
How not to be hanged
It’s true that the law surrounding duty of care can be complicated but care workers aren’t expected to have the same knowledge as barristers. We’re expected to understand the basic principles of care law, to know what to do if we’re unsure and we have to act reasonably. We don’t even need to be right every time. We only need to be reasonable.
This 90 minute webinar/tutorial is designed for workers who are far too busy delivering care to spend their time reading through long reports of legal precedent. It covers the basic points we all need to be safe ‘at the coal face’ of care delivery in a practical, work-based way that is both engaging and understandable.
Delivered in plain English, the basic message of ‘Hanged if you do – Hanged if you don’t’ is
‘Don’t panic’.
By taking the mystery and complicated jargon out of the equation, Stuart Sorensen guides workers step by step from basic principles to a solid understanding of duty of care. Real life stories and clear examples are used throughout to make the webinar both absorbing and easy to apply in practice.
Click here to join us on Wednesday 24th February 2021 7pm – 8:30pm GMT
The webinar covers:
Professionalism
The duty of care myth
Balancing rights, risks and responsibilities
Common law and necessity
Being reasonable
Safeguarding
Mental capacity and the right to decide
Acting in best interests
How not to be Hanged
Click here to join us on Wednesday 24th February 2021 7pm – 8:30pm GMT
Invitations by Email once £10 payment received.
Mention the word psychosis to most people and they immediately think of headline grabbing tragedies and untreatable, unmanageable people they’d rather not have anything to do with. This is inevitable given the way that the subject is covered in the press but it’s not really very accurate.
People diagnosed with psychosis, like people diagnosed with other mental health problems are more likely to harm themselves than others.
This hour long, online tutorial lifts the lid on the myths about psychosis and psychotic conditions like schizophrenia. It introduces participants to the practical, common sense things that they can do to support their relatives, their service-users and themselves. By breaking symptoms and problems down into manageable ‘chunks’ and by relating them to participants’ own experiences we build a clear understanding of what psychosis and schizophrenia really means.
The tutorial is open to anyone with an interest in the topic be they relatives, carers or, most importantly people with psychosis themselves.
I’ve always thought of myself as a face to face, engage with a live cohort/audience sort of trainer/speaker until…
I asked yesterday for volunteers to do tutorials with as a form of content marketing. The very first contact I had was for group training over zoom. A little thought later I agreed. I’m about to start a whole new voyage of discovery into online training.
If you’ve been wondering how to get decent quality, interactive training on mental health and social care in these days of lockdown, look no further.
Go on, you know you want to.
Is anxiety a choice?
Is an anxiety disorder a choice?
Can a person choose not to be anxious?
Last night I had an interesting conversation with a stranger in the car park of my local supermarket. We’d exchanged a few pleasantries in the queue for the checkout – like me he refuses to use automated checkouts because, also like me, he’d much prefer that people keep their jobs.
We happened to have parked our cars next to each other on the way in and so the conversation continued in the car park, this time the subject was cars, driving and the rather nasty bump he’d had to the front of his vehicle. That conversation reminded me of today’s topic on anxiety.
Some time ago, one dark winter morning I found myself driving to work down unlit country roads in the rain. Visibility was poor and so I wasn’t going particularly fast which turned out to be a really good idea.
Also on the road on that dark, wet morning was a cyclist. A cyclist who was dressed in dark clothing with no lights and no helmet. To be honest I don’t even know how this guy might possibly have seen where he was going without lights – it really was that dark. However, presumably he could. I couldn’t see him though.
As I approached this invisible cyclist he pulled out into the middle of the road intending to turn right. You can guess what happened next. That’s why it’s such a good job I wasn’t going very fast. If I’d been driving at the legal speed limit instead of to the actual conditions I’d probably have killed him.
Fortunately, amazingly even he was OK apart from a few bruises. The ambulance came and took him to hospital where he was checked over. The police arrived and took my details, including my negative breath/alcohol test and I called in to work to explain that I wouldn’t be in that day. What happened next was revealing, especially about anxiety, phobias, avoidance and the ease with which normal freeze, flight or fight responses can become pathologies if we’re not careful.
My plan had been to return to work the following day. However within an hour or two of getting back to my accommodation I’d started to think. I actually believe that it would have been much easier to deal with the anxiety that followed if the accident had been my fault. If I’d done something wrong I could just decide to correct the flaw in my driving and make sure that nothing like this happened again. But that’s not what happened.
No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t think of any aspect of my driving that morning that I can change for the better. I hadn’t been drinking, I wasn’t going particularly fast, I was awake and alert, I was certainly concentrating due to the poor conditions, my car was in good condition and roadworthy and I was correctly positioned on the road. There was nothing I could think of to do that might prevent something like this happening again and if it does the next one might be fatal. That’s a really scary prospect.
It’s interesting that even though this is the first such accident I’ve had in over 30 years of driving all across UK, all that evidence of safe driving paled into insignificance against this one event. That’s because of a particular mental shortcut, an heuristic we know as the availability heuristic. I mentioned heuristics in an earlier video as part of my evolutionary psychology series. Click the link at the top of the screen for more information.
The availability heuristic is an evolved mental strategy that gives precedence to recent events. In a changing environment it’s useful – it allowed our ancestors to recall and give weight to the location of food, of predators and a whole host of other, changing environmental and behavioural artefacts. In the modern world it’s still extremely valuable but it has its drawbacks. One such drawback is the over-emphasis we give recent events. Here’s how it can turn useful anxiety into pathological disorders.
My emphasis on this single, recent memory caused me to work hard to find a way to avoid similar problems in the future. So far so good – we can all see the benefit of that. Unfortunately, the only thing I could come up with to avoid a repetition of this awful event is to stop driving. That’s rather less positive – especially in the light of the odds, bearing in mind my years, even decades of driving without hitting anyone, cyclist or not. But recent memories are the thing and that’s why I seriously considered not driving, giving up my job because I’d have no way to get to work without my car and I even spent time trying to rework my finances to allow me to retire early, all because I didn’t want to drive.
Now think about this. If I’d actually stopped driving that day what would my most recent driving memory be? Obviously it would be the traumatic memory of hitting, and initially thinking I’d seriously injured or even killed a cyclist. If that’s the result of the availability heuristic, the result of my most recent memory then my anxiety about driving will never dissipate. Not only that, the sense of fear I’d feel when contemplating driving, coupled with the relief I feel when deciding not to constantly reinforces the heuristic every time I think about getting back into the car.
Even though I know all this it took me three more days to pluck up the courage to drive my car again. I chose a quiet, sunny afternoon in broad daylight and drove around quiet country roads and literally had to force myself to turn the key and start the engine. That gave me a new memory but not enough to overcome the power of the traumatic heuristic. Powerful, traumatic memories take a lot of subsequent memories to take away the fear they generate. And the longer we avoid the issue the harder the trauma is to overcome. And that’s the point of this little video.
If you have an anxiety state that doesn’t seem rational, regardless of the emotion you feel, it’s important to ignore the emotion. Do this as soon as you can to build up new memories that can take advantage of the availability heuristic. That’s what people mean when they tell people to get back on the horse. Don’t let anxiety overcome rationality or you might find that your life choices become governed by fear to such an extent that avoidance shrinks your world, your opportunities and your options over time until there’s almost nothing left.
And it all begins when we give in to traumatic memories because of the availability heuristic.
Mind The Care Training 