Why is Mental Health Training important?

Mental health training helps employees recognize the signs of mental distress in themselves and others. This helps them not only handle larger crises but also to intervene before the distress becomes an emergency.

Employed persons spend 8 hours per day at work. The hours they are most productive in their lives. With fewer Human Resource systems set up to support and monitor mental health at the workplace, I open the conversation to institutions, supporting them with tools to formulate mental well-being structures.

Everyone knows that first-aid training saves lives—which is why it’s a common component of many companies’ wellness efforts. Yet few organizational leaders choose to educate their workforces about mental health, a set of conditions that cause more lost workdays and impairment than arthritis, asthma, back pain, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease.

Why?

It’s not because mental illness is uncommon or already managed in the population. On average, 1 in 4 Kenyans will experience it in their lifetimes. Of those, approximately two-thirds won’t receive treatment.

There are fewer than 500 specialist mental health workers to serve Kenya’s population of over 50 million, according to the International Journal of Mental Health systems. The World Health Organization recommends the integration of mental health care into primary health care services to improve access to and equity of this care, especially in low and middle-income countries. An important step to integrating mental health care into primary health care services is to determine the mental health literacy levels of the primary health care workforce.

Despite the fact that over 200 million workdays are lost due to mental health conditions each year ($16.8 billion in employee productivity) according to the Harvard Business Review, mental health remains a taboo subject. In fact, almost 60% of employees have never spoken to anyone at work about their mental health status.

Because companies are not doing enough to break down mental health stigma, many people don’t self-identify as having a diagnosable mental health condition, even though up to 80% of us will manage one in our lifetimes.

Areas Covered in the training:

• Mental health first aid
• Stress
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Addiction
• Work-life balance

Learning Outcome

• Learn how to take positive steps to remove the stigma surrounding mental ill-health.
• Understand different mental illnesses, how to recognize changes in behaviour and what to keep an eye on.
• Learn how happier staff make better, more productive staff and what you can to support others.