Youth Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mental Health First Aid

Prospective users

Aims & approach

Youth Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander MHFA is an informative, strength-based course that provides adults in either schools or broader communities with a practical skillset and toolkit to appropriately support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people who may be experiencing a mental health problem or crisis.

Delivered by MHFA trained and Licensed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander instructors, the course is designed to draw upon the instructors' own unique and instrumental local cultural knowledge, to enrich the content and enable culturally informed and safe delivery. This is vitally important for cultural safety and contextual delivery of courses within local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

The program can be delivered face-to-face or online.Schools can engage an external Licensed Instructor to deliver courses to their school community.

Alternatively, increase internal capacity by training an eligible staff member as a Licensed Instructor through a 5-day face-to-face Instructor training course, to then deliver courses on behalf of the school.

Together with the upcoming Youth Yarns Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander MHFA course for students, the program has a whole-school approach, creating a circle of safety.

Licensed Instructors are not employees of Mental Health First Aid Australia. External Licensed Instructor(s) should be contacted directly through the website here YAMHFA-organise-in-house-training. Costs will vary between individual Instructors and delivery mode chosen.

Implementation support

• Access to professional facilitator, instructor or mentor
• Implementation training webinars or modules

Evidence

The Youth Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander MHFA course is informed by the Youth MHFA guidelines as well as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander MHFA guidelines, which have included youth specific considerations for supporting young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In addition, extensive consultation with cultural, clinical and lived experience experts was conducted during the course development phases. Course content is based on research and grounds participants in social and emotional wellbeing from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspective.

To identify what constitutes best practice mental health first aid, extensive research has been carried out to develop Mental Health First Aid guidelines using the Delphi expert consensus method (i.e., consensus-based guidelines).

Guidelines specific to providing mental health first aid to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including communication guidelines for supporting an adolescent, have also informed course curriculum. The full guidelines can be found at https://mhfainternational.org/guidelines/.

The course is also informed by other youth MHFA programs that have strong evidence of impact such as the Youth MHFA program, evaluations of which have consistently shown that MHFA training is associated with improved knowledge of mental illnesses, their treatments and appropriate first aid strategies, confidence in providing first aid to a person experiencing a mental health problem, decreases in stigmatising attitudes, and increases in the amount and type of support provided to others. All MHFA-related research can be found at https://www.mhfa.com.au/about-us/research-and-evaluation/our-research/.

More information about how MHFA courses are developed can be found at https://www.mhfa.com.au/about-us/research-and-evaluation/.

This course is recognised by Suicide Prevention Australia as a safe, high-quality, and effective suicide prevention program.