4 Key Learnings from Mental Health First Aid (MHFA)

Recently I attended a Mental Health First Aid course.  I learned an awful lot over those two days.  I highly encourage everyone to attend the course, because I truly feel that the more knowledgeable and equipped we are to assist someone who may be experiencing a mental illness, or developing a mental health crisis, then the better we will all be.

One of the final activities we did to solidify everything we had learnt during the course involved making commitments about what we were going to do with our newfound knowledge.  I committed to the group that I was going to be more mindful with my words and make an effort to stop using inaccurate and harmful language.  It had never previously occurred to me just how often we casually use derogatory and discriminatory words in everyday speech and just how harmful this can be in perpetuating the stigma around mental illness.

This really hit home with me the other morning when I was on the phone to my Dad and my son was bouncing around me, making a lot of noise and generally being a toddler who wanted my attention.  I was finding it hard to concentrate on my conversation and I interrupted Dad to let him know I couldn’t hear him because my son was “acting mental”.  I caught myself the second I said it.  I felt terrible.  My son wasn’t “acting mental”, he was just acting like an excitable toddler.  I rephrased and told Dad - “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, that’s not accurate.  He's just acting like a toddler”.

I was shocked that I used that phrase so flippantly and then acknowledged that before attending the MHFA course I honestly wouldn't have thought anything of it.  But now, I’m taking stock and making better language choices because I believe that language matters.  And because I now know that one in five Australian adults will experience some form of common diagnosed mental illness in any one year, I know that my language matters to more people than I realised. 

Another statistic I was saddened to learn during the course is that one in two people don’t receive professional help.  A big factor in why people don’t seek help is the stigma around mental health.  Whilst I acknowledge that we’ve made some progress over the past years, I definitely think more can be done and that it is worth being more thoughtful in the words that we use to describe mental health.