Johnson County Mental Health’s program provides help for youth in crisis

With the pandemic and its isolation, many are concerned with mental health, especially when it comes to young people. That’s where Johnson County Mental Health’s Youth Mental Health First Aid comes into play.

The agency has been holding this class in two varieties — for adult mental health and youth mental health — for a while now. Since August, they’ve shifted to make it available online in a live Zoom session.

With the youth session, the idea is to give parents, teachers, caregivers and other folks who work with or interact with teenagers the tools they need to approach a situation where they’re concerned about someone’s mental health.

The sessions, which run in an all-day format, cost $25 per person, but there are limited scholarships available for those with financial need. The general trainings happen twice a month, but the youth-focused ones happen about every other month.

Typically, there are about 10 people in each training session, said Jamie Katz, prevention coordinator at Johnson County Mental Health and one of the instructors for the training.

“We really started Mental Health First Aid with the idea we really wanted to give regular individuals in our community the opportunity to learn how to help somebody who’s experiencing mental health problems or having a mental health crisis,” she said.

The program uses a curriculum developed in Australia that’s also sponsored by the National Council for Behavioral Health.

“We know mental health conditions start early. Half (of people who have them) will have symptoms by age 14, three-quarters by 25,” Katz said. “Early intervention is critical for their lives.”

The class helps adults develop a plan as to how they can approach someone having a problem without making it worse.

Main ideas of the course are to look at a situation and consider the risks of suicide or harm, listen without judging the person, reassure them and help them get information, suggest the proper professional who can help and help them find other ways to cope.

At a November training, instructor Jessica Waller said that the question people ask her the most is what to do if the person doesn’t want help.

“Don’t threaten them with hospitalization. That’s not a way to build trust,” Waller said. “Suggest a trusted person for them to talk to, remain patient, remain friendly and open. They might come back and talk later if they don’t want to talk now.”

Katz said she’s heard several stories where the training has made a difference. Someone who took the class told them that after seeing a family friend exhibit possible mental health symptoms, they felt comfortable approaching that person and expressing their concerns.

“That individual opened and said, ‘I have been having thoughts of suicide,’ and that individual was able to get that (other) individual help. Without mental health first aid, they don’t think that would have happened, that they would have felt comfortable enough that they knew how to approach that family friend,” Katz said.

The county has been working with local schools to get staff trained and has been especially successful partnering with the Gardner-Edgerton schools.

On the back of that, they’ve been piloting a peer-to-peer program to train other teens in how to talk with friends they see struggling with mental health issues. That program requires a school district to have at least 10% of its staff go through the training first, so students have a resource when they have questions.

For more information about signing up for the program, contact Johnson County Mental Health at JCMHCevents@jocogov.org or 913-715-7880.

This story was originally published December 31, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Johnson County Mental Health’s program provides help for youth in crisis."