Mental Health First Aid

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There’s no way to describe the sound of toddler choking until you hear it. Once you hear it, you can’t forget it. A gasp? A wheeze?

I saw his eyes. 4-year-old eyes. Eyes of a non-verbal preschool student with Autism. There was panic in his eyes.

There was panic in mine, too.

As a paraprofessional in 2006, I had chosen to take a Red Cross First Aid and CPR class before my time in the classroom began. I felt the need to be prepared to protect my students, I wanted to keep them safe. I knew what to do.

Teaching a decade later, that desire to keep my student safe didn’t change. But now, keeping them safe looked significantly different. My middle schoolers weren’t physically choking, but the world and their experiences in it were emotionally choking them: depression, anxiety, disordered eating, substance abuse, disruptive behavior disorders, ADHD, and suicide.

2016 shook me. Hard. 2016 was the year where each of those horrific mental health challenges and disorders manifested themselves in my students. There are names and faces behind each of those big scary words. But there are countless names and faces who I may have missed, too. There was no Red Cross class for me to take to help keep them safe. I felt at a loss.

But in 2019, Governor Ducey signed SB 1468 into law. “The Mitch Warnock Act requires all school employees who work with students in grades six through 12 to receive training on suicide prevention at least once every three years.” More specifically, SB1468 mandates that these professional development opportunities be evidenced-based and include “Training in suicide prevention, Training to identify warning signs of suicidal behavior in adolescents and teens; and Appropriate intervention and referral techniques.”

Though the requirement doesn’t take effect until the 2020-2021 school year, I felt compelled to take advantage of an opportunity to become Mental Health First Aid trained.

The National Council for Behavioral Health’s Mental Health First Aid workbook by Kitchner and Jorn outlines 6 reasons why people who live or work with young people need training in Mental Health First Aid, but two of them resonated with me:

• Mental health challenges and disorders often develop during adolescence. One half of all chronic mental illness begins by age 14; three quarters by age 24.
• Approximately 20% of youth ages 13-18 experience severe mental disorders in a given year.

If half of chronic mental illness begins by 14, that meant that if a student was to develop a chronic mental illness, there was a good chance I could have noticed the warning signs in my seventh-grade classroom. In my district, our contracted maximum student contact is 200 students/day. 20% of 200 is 40 students. That is an entire class period of students who will experience a mental disorder each year. I started down the unhealthy and unproductive rabbit hole of what-ifs. 20% of the 1400 kids I had in my 10 years in the classroom was 280. Two. Hundred. And Eighty.

After reading those statistics, I stepped out of the training, defeated by my failure and overwhelmed with my inability to help keep my students safe, happy, and mentally healthy. But what this class did was give me the tools to move past the what ifs to the ‘now what?’

Now I know the science and the research to help the early career educators in my district take mental health seriously. Now I know the resources and first responders available as support to those struggling with mental health challenges and disorders. Now, I know what would have made me a better teacher then. Now I know how to help the students of my beginning teachers. I have to focus on the now.

Required professional development, especially when mandated from the state, often gets a bad rap. But this class. This class in 2019 was as essential to me and my ability to keep students safe as that Red Cross First Aid and CPR Class.

What has been the most helpful resource or class you’ve come across to address Youth Mental Health First Aid? What steps has your school taken to support students and the teachers who care for them?

Sources:

https://azgovernor.gov/governor/news/2019/05/governor-ducey-signs-bill-combating-teen-suicide

https://trackbill.com/bill/arizona-senate-bill-1468-schools-suicide-prevention-training/1672054/

Kitchner, B. and Jorm, A. (2016). Youth mental health first aid USA. Baltimore, MD: Mental Health Association of Maryland, Inc.

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Jen Hudson

I always knew I was going to be a teacher; from assigning neighborhood kids homework during the summer to reading with a flashlight under the covers, school and learning have always been something I have loved. Phoenix born and raised, I attended Northern Arizona University and received my undergraduate degree in English Education. While at NAU, I received the Golden Axe Award and was lucky enough to be the President of Kappa Delta Pi, the International Honor Society in Education. After college, I spent my time in the classroom teaching 7th and 8th grade English Language Arts. I wanted to push my instruction and my students’ learning, so I decided to pursue a Masters in Curriculum and Instruction from Arizona State University, which was completed in 2010. This desire to do more for my students continued through 2013 when I was named Arizona English Teachers’ Association’s Teacher of Excellence and received my National Board Certification in English Language Arts/Early Adolescence. In 2017, I earned Master Teacher recognition. This will be my second year as a Mentor Teacher for first-year middle and high school teachers in my district and I am looking forward to continuing to learn and grow with my new teachers. On a personal level, I still love to read (though the flashlight has been replaced with a Kindle). Most of my time is spent with my husband, Chris, our toddler, Oliver, our newborn, Carter, and our pitbull-dachshund mix, Kipton. I love all things Sun Devil football and am known to binge-watch 90s and early 2000 sitcoms much too often.