Grace of Eights Mental Health First Aid Training

17/02/2025

If your loved one has recently been diagnosed with a mental health condition, you might be struggling with grief.

When we think about grief, we often picture the loss of a loved one who has passed away. However, caregivers frequently experience a unique and complex form of grief while caring for someone who is still living. This experience is common and deserves recognition.

The Caring Journey: Understanding the Phases

Caring for someone with mental illness often follows a path with distinct phases, each bringing its own emotional challenges:

Phase 1: Recognition
The journey often begins with a troubling awareness - you notice persistent changes in your loved one's behavior, thinking, or emotional state. These aren't just occasional odd moments, but consistent patterns that signal something is wrong.

Phase 2: Diagnosis and Starting Treatment
This phase brings both clarity and new challenges as you receive a formal diagnosis. You begin learning about the condition and navigate the healthcare system, possibly including hospitalisation. This period often brings a mix of relief at having answers and anxiety about the future.

Phase 3: The Adjustment Period
Now comes the complex work of finding the right treatment approach or dealing with side effects, lack of insight, denial or unwillingness to comply with medication and treatment. You might experience setbacks and improvements as medications are adjusted and you search for the right healthcare providers. During this time, you may start recognising your own need for support.

Phase 4: Daily Management
The reality of long-term caregiving sets in. You learn to balance the demands of caregiving with other life responsibilities, sometimes making difficult decisions about work and personal commitments.

Phase 5: Finding Your Rhythm
With time and experience, many caregivers develop effective routines and realistic expectations. You build stronger support networks and find ways to maintain your own well-being while caring for others.

Phase 6: Role Transition
Sometimes, the active caregiving role ends - whether due to recovery, changed circumstances, or other factors. This transition can happen at any point and brings its own emotional challenges.
Understanding Ambiguous Loss

Throughout these phases, caregivers often experience what experts call "ambiguous loss" - grieving someone who is physically present but somehow changed or absent in other ways. This creates a unique form of grief characterised by:
• Feeling stuck between hope and hopelessness
• Ongoing loss without clear resolution
• Uncertainty about the future
• Guilt about grieving someone who is still alive

Living with Both Hope and Loss

One of the most challenging aspects of being a caregiver is managing conflicting emotions. You might feel deep love for the person while struggling with their behaviors. Rather than seeking "closure," many caregivers find strength in accepting that they can hold both joy and sorrow, both hope and grief.

Understanding "Recycled" and "Complicated" Grief

Grief often resurfaces during celebrations or life events, It happens when a carer is reminded of the extent to which illness has impacted on the life of the person they care for.

Many carers attend birthdays, weddings and graduations knowing that the person they care for cannot experience the joy of these special occasions. This reality can be difficult to accept with each celebration acting as a trigger for grief known as "recycled" or "living" grief. Some caregivers experience "complicated" grief, which can take several forms:

• Chronic grief that seems endless
• Delayed grief that emerges unexpectedly later
• Overwhelming emotional responses
• Grief that's hidden or denied

Finding Your Path Forward

While there's no "getting over" these experiences, many caregivers find ways to live meaningfully alongside their grief. Signs of healthy adaptation include:

• Being able to talk openly about your situation
• Finding balance between caring for others and yourself
• Accepting support from others
• Gradually rebuilding a fulfilling life while maintaining your caregiving role

Remember, it's okay to seek help. Professional support services, including grief counseling, can provide valuable assistance as you navigate these complex emotions.

If you need immediate support, services like the Grief Line (1300 845 745) offer free, anonymous counseling from midday to 3:00 AM, seven days a week.

Your grief as a caregiver is real. While the journey isn't easy, understanding these emotions and seeking support when needed can help you maintain both your caregiving role and your own wellbeing.

Resources:
The leading specialist in ambiguous loss: https://www.ambiguousloss.com/
https://whatsyourgrief.com/ambiguous-grief-grieving-someone-who-is-still-alive/
LEAP Institute – managing lack of insight: https://leapinstitute.org/about/

24/01/2025

In our journey through life, we may encounter a profound psychological state known as "the void." This article aims to explore what the void is, how it impacts our mental health, and what we can do to navigate through it.

The void is a state of existential crisis that often occurs at the end of a process of deconstruction - when scepticism and critical thinking have broken down previously held beliefs and truths. It's characterised by a deep sense of meaninglessness, a loss of purpose, and a confrontation with life's

20/01/2025

What's up with burnout?

In recent decades, the term "burnout" has become increasingly prevalent, depicting the experience of employees who find themselves emotionally drained, cynical, and feeling ineffective at work. The conversation around burnout as a distinct workplace syndrome has garnered significant attention from occupational health experts, psychologists, and the general public. However, contrasting viewpoints exist regarding whether burnout qualifies as a well-defined clinical entity stemming directly from chronic job stress.

On one side of the debate lies growing scientific evidence suggesting burnout represents a legitimate phenomenon with serious consequences. In 2019 the World Health Organisation (W.H.O) updated its International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) to include Burnout as an ‘occupational phenomenon’ – but it was not classified as a medical condition. The W.H.O refers to the definition established by the widely-used Maslach Burnout Inventory, which has burnout characterized by three core dimensions:

1. overwhelming exhaustion,

2. feelings of cynicism and detachment from one's work, and

3. a sense of diminished professional efficacy.

Neuroimaging studies have revealed that burnout is associated with physical changes in brain areas involved in emotional regulation, cognitive functioning, and the stress response system. Individuals suffering from burnout show alterations in the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and hippocampus. This dysregulation may lead to impairments in cognitive abilities like attention, working memory, and creativity. Moreover, the chronic stress underpinning burnout appears to throw the body's neuroendocrine system off balance, resulting in abnormal cortisol levels that promote systemic inflammation and increase risk for serious conditions like coronary heart disease.

While the negative impacts of burnout seem clear from this research, an opposing perspective challenges the fundamental validity of burnout as a legitimate clinical syndrome directly caused by factors in the workplace. Critics argue that the conceptualization of burnout as a combination of exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced efficacy was largely pre-defined before rigorous empirical research occurred. The reasoning for why these three particular symptoms constitute a distinct syndrome, separate from conditions like depression, remains unclear and lacks a strong clinical or theoretical basis. However, for those of us who have experienced both clinical depression and burnout, there is a distinct difference; if you remove yourself from the situation that is causing burnout – your caring role, your toxic workplace, overwork and or struggle for survival – your symptoms start to resolve. With enough rest and recovery, the burnout symptoms lift. If you are experiencing clinical depression, it does not matter how much rest and recovery you throw at it, the symptoms persist. Without effective treatment such as psychotherapy and or medication, clinical depression symptoms do not resolve.

Furthermore, evidence that burnout is primarily induced by unmanageable work stress is lacking. Job stressors have been found to be relatively weak predictors of burnout, and no conclusive proof exists that they contribute more to burnout than other sources of stress outside the workplace. The proposed causal link between occupational factors and burnout appears tenuous.

After nearly 50 years of research on the topic, the inability to establish validated diagnostic criteria for burnout also raises scepticism about its legitimacy as a clinical entity. Some have proposed that burnout may simply represent an artificial construct lacking enough coherence to allow proper diagnosis and measurement of prevalence rates.

Given these issues, some experts have advocated for revising or removing burnout's status from clinical manuals like the ICD-11, which currently categories it as a factor influencing health status. They argue the various existing categories for stress, anxiety, and depressive disorders provide sufficient means to address job-related distress without a separate, ill-defined burnout classification.

As the debate continues, one perspective views burnout as an insidious condition inducing neurological changes and cognitive impairment from the accumulated toll of chronic workplace stress.
The opposing viewpoint argues burnout lacks sufficient validation as a distinct clinical syndrome stemming specifically from occupational factors. Resolving this controversy will likely require more rigorous, longitudinal research to either solidify burnout as a legitimate occupational phenomenon or refine our understanding of how chronic stress manifests across work and personal life domains. With so much at stake for employee health and productivity, the burnout discussion represents an important priority for the field of occupational health psychology.

In the meantime, what can workplaces do to mitigate the risks of psychosocial hazards that can impact mental health? The answer is Mental Health Literacy training to increase capacity for recognising when a team member is experiencing poor mental health or poor performance related to mental health and gaining the skills needed to have a supportive conversation before any major issues or injury occur.

I have trained over 2000 people in Mental Health Literacy Courses – don’t wait until the symptoms of burnout show up in you, your team or the people you love. Contact me to discuss your training needs.

Sources:

Bianchi R, Schonfeld IS. Examining the evidence base for burnout. Bull World Health Organ. 2023 Nov 1;101(11):743-745. doi: 10.2471/BLT.23.289996. Epub 2023 Oct 4. PMID: 37961064; PMCID: PMC10630726. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10630726/

https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/burnout-and-the-brain (Note: the article linked was written in 2016 and the ICD-11 was updated in 2019 – otherwise it is an excellent article on the history of burnout and its cognitive impacts on the brain)

27/09/2024

Reframing Stress: A New Perspective on an Age-Old Challenge

For decades, stress has been vilified as a silent killer, blamed for a myriad of health issues ranging from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. However, recent research is challenging this long-held belief, suggesting that our perception of stress might be more influential than the stress itself. This paradigm shift offers a powerful new approach to managing stress and improving overall well-being.

A groundbreaking study tracking 30,000 adults in the United States over eight years revealed a startling finding: the belief that stress is harmful was a stronger predictor of health problems than the amount of stress experienced. People who reported high stress levels but didn't view stress as harmful had the lowest risk of dying compared to those who believed stress was detrimental to their health. This discovery underscores the crucial role our mindset plays in how stress affects our health. By changing how we think about stress, we can potentially transform it from a health risk into a resource for growth and resilience.

Common physical manifestations of stress, such as increased heart rate and rapid breathing, are often interpreted as signs of anxiety or poor coping. However, research shows that reframing these symptoms as helpful preparations for meeting challenges can lead to a healthier stress response. A study conducted at Harvard University found that participants who were taught to view their stress response as beneficial showed a more adaptive cardiovascular profile during stressful tasks. Their heart rates increased, but their blood vessels remained relaxed – a pattern more similar to what occurs during positive emotional states like joy and courage.

Tips for taming and reframing stress:

1. Recognise that some stress is necessary for growth and resilience, but don’t ignore it!

2. When you feel stress symptoms, remind yourself that your body is preparing you to meet the challenge ahead.

3. Focus on what you can control rather than what you can’t.

4. Practice regular stress-relief techniques such as exercise and deep abdominal breathing practice.

5. Take breaks! Use intentional recovery during the day by doing something fun or relaxing for a few minutes in every hour – use the Pomodoro technique. Make sure you have a complete break from responsibilities at least one day a month – preferably weekly. Plan and take regular weekend and day trips/holidays, as well as planning for a longer holiday every year.

While mild to moderate stress can be managed individually, excessive stress (stress that is consistently ruining your sleep and peace of mind despite your attempts to manage it) may require professional support. Workplace stress should be addressed through organisational strategies and supportive leadership. By changing our perspective on stress, addressing symptoms early and ensuring supportive environments, we can better manage its impact on our lives.

References:
1Keller A, Litzelman K, Wisk LE, Maddox T, Cheng ER, Creswell PD, Witt WP. Does the perception that stress affects health matter? The association with health and mortality. Health Psychol. 2012 Sep;31(5):677-84. doi: 10.1037/a0026743. Epub 2011 Dec 26. PMID: 22201278; PMCID: PMC3374921.

2Jamieson, Jeremy & Mendes, Wendy & Nock, Matthew. (2013). Improving Acute Stress Responses The Power of Reappraisal. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 22. 51-56. 10.1177/0963721412461500.

20/09/2024

📚 Invest in Your Team's Mental Health - It Pays Off!

Did you know? Mental Health Literacy Courses are not just good for your employees' well-being - they're great for your bottom line too!

🔍 Early intervention and identification of mental health issues
🏥 Facilitating access to quality mental health care
These strategies are associated with a staggering 492% return on investment!*

How? By reducing absenteeism and improving work performance.

🧠 Empower your team with knowledge
💼 Boost productivity
💰 Save costs in the long run

Invest in evidence-based Mental Health Literacy Courses today. Your employees - and your business - will thank you.


*Reference:
Whiteford, HA, Sheridan, J, Cleary, CM, & Hilton, MF 2005, ‘The work outcomes research cost-benefit (WORC) project: The return on investment for facilitating help seeking behaviour’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 39 (Suppl.2), no. A37

16/09/2024

Our lead trainer has trained 1824 people in Mental Health First Aid across the following industries:

Federal, state and Government agencies and local councils.
Port Services - Stevedores
Construction workers
Disability Support Services
Hospitality, Tourism and Travel
Entertainment Industry
Community Legal Services
Schools and Early Childhood Education Sector
TAFE Sector
Animal Welfare Sector

We can design bespoke Mental Health Awareness Prevention and Support workshops for your specific needs:

❗️Stress and burnout - including digital wellbeing strategies
👍Compassionate Leadership - managing people with mental health challenges
🌱Resilience and positive psychology and much more...

Got a mental health topic in mind or a business problem you want to solve? We can design a workshop for you, face to face or online!

21/10/2023

Do you know someone deeply affected by the current events in the Middle East? Psychology Tools have translated a selection of trauma psychoeducation resources into Hebrew, Arabic, and English. They are freely available for everyone to download and use. Please feel free to share.

We've made a selection of Hebrew, Arabic, and English trauma psychoeducation resources freely available for everyone to download and use.

14/07/2023

Time to put the fear to rest and learn some skills. Do you need training to know when to intervene and have a conversation before things escalate? Welfare before work performance is the aim of the game! Get ahead of the curve with Mental Health First Aid training. Contact me for more information.

14/07/2023

📢 Boost Mental Wellbeing in Your Workplace with Mental Health First Aid Training! 🧠💪

Did you know that the financial burden of mental ill-health on Australian employers amounts to a staggering $39.9 billion1️⃣ annually? 😱 This alarming statistic has prompted new federal legislation, making it mandatory for employers to address psychosocial hazards within the WHS Act. As a result, there is an increasing emphasis on identifying and reducing these hazards in the workplace.

To enhance the mental wellbeing of your workforce, it is crucial for managers and team leaders to foster effective interactions, build trust, and promote resilience. 🤝✨

According to a report commissioned by the UK Government and conducted by Deloitte 2️⃣, proactive organization-wide activities, such as mental health literacy training, have a more significant impact than reactive, individual-focused interventions. In fact, for every $1 invested in training, a remarkable return of $5 was yielded! 💰✅ Raising awareness and improving mental health literacy is considered one of the most cost-effective ways to address workplace mental health concerns.

Managers play a critical role in creating a healthy workplace, and that's where Mental Health First Aid comes in. The program is specifically designed to equip your leaders with the skills to have effective conversations about mental health. 🗣️💼 By participating in this training, your managers will gain the knowledge and confidence to initiate first aid conversations. They will also receive valuable guidance and resources to identify when individuals are struggling and provide appropriate support and direction.

Don't miss this opportunity to invest in the mental wellbeing of your employees and create a thriving workplace culture. Together, we can make a significant difference! 💚

🔗 Contact us for a quote and to find out more.

Sources:
1️⃣ Committee for Economic Development: Mental Health and the Workplace Report: https://www.ceda.com.au/ResearchAndPolicies/Research/Health-Ageing/Mental-Health-and-the-Workplace

2️⃣ Deloitte Mental Health and Employers: The case for Investment Report: https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/consulting/articles/mental-health-and-employers-refreshing-the-case-for-investment.html

Mental health and employers: refreshing the case for investment, builds on previous Deloitte research published in 2017 to help us understand more about mental health and wellbeing in today’s labour market.

15/11/2022

Tonight, the ABC will air episode 3 of Magda’s Big Health Check at 7:30 pm AEST. Hosted by comedian, Magda Szubanski, the series sets out to explore what health looks like in Australia today, revealing major health challenges facing our society and how we can work together to improve our chances of a healthy life.

In tonight’s episode, Magda looks at the rates of mental ill health in Australia and travels to a secondary school (Northern Bay College) in Corio, Victoria to see how schools are supporting students and tackling mental health problems at a localised, community level. When Magda visits the school, she participates in a Year 11 classroom delivery of Teen Mental Health First Aid. She also talks to some of the students about the Teen course and the benefits of the peer-to-peer approach

21/10/2022

Everyone experiences times of struggle and low mood. Mental Health First Aid gives you the skills to help support family, friends and colleagues.

Life is full of ups and downs. But for some, life can be particularly down.Learn the skills to listen, connect and support. Having a conversation may save a ...