DYNAMIC DUO OF MENTAL HEALTH
TAFE teachers blaze trail in education, breaking stigma
Two teachers are blazing a trail for mental-health education at TAFE as they combine industry knowledge with quality training that is proving successful as their students enter the workforce, sometimes chosen over other applicants with a university degree.
Greg Latham and Eileen Newman, or better known as the mental-health team at Townsville TAFE, are pioneers in Australian education in the field because of their passion to break down stigma surrounding people with issues and boost knowledge to create supportive environments.
Mr Latham has spent years developing and building on mental-health education to en
sure students receive all the knowledge they need to deliver the best care possible – something he wasn’t provided with when he first began work as a support worker.
“I was quite a new support worker and you just got thrown in … I wasn’t given all of the tools to do the job and I was left asking so many questions,” he said. “Then my supervisor said ‘would you like to train new support workers coming in?’
“And I said ‘yes, but only if I get training’ and I think after a couple of years they were being trained the way that I would have wanted to be so nothing is missed out; everything is covered.”
During his time as a trainer and assessor, Mr Latham came across Ms Newman after she began a certificate in health administration. Once she completed it, he urged her to continue her education with a certificate IV in mental health, pointing her on a new career path. After Ms Newman secured a job at TAFE teaching the dual diploma of mental health and diploma of alcohol and other drugs, their paths crossed again. After she convinced Mr Latham to pick up a role teaching the certificate IV in mental health alongside her, they began a journey together in mental-health education.
“It’s really about valuing the person before you even talk about their mental-health symptoms or signs or behaviour or anything that goes on, but valuing the actual person that you’re meeting,” Ms Newman said.
“We say that you need to experience what they’re experiencing in their life and what’s happening for them, but you don’t stay there. You can go in there and see what’s happening, what their thoughts are, what their feelings are, but then also think about how do you get the correct help or link them to the correct support networks and how do you engage in those conversations?”
In their classrooms, the dynamic duo invite their students to consider different perspectives when interacting with people with mental-health issues and provide them with the tools that correlate to what employers are seeking from prospective hires.
“It’s like raising a big family,” Mr Latham said.
“We had one young student, and when I delivered mentalhealth first aid last year, I invited her in and she said, ‘there’s nowhere in Townsville that will employ a person with lived experience in mental health’.
“And I said, ‘that’s not true; you just haven’t found it yet’ and where she is now, she’s got the dream job.
“Because of her experience there and the knowledge that she’s been able to demonstrate, the organisation has now put out an advertisement saying they are happy to take any of our students if they’d like to come for an interview.
“All these new, innovative ideas that as teachers in TAFE we need to know about, so we’ve got to stay in contact with industry and our networking groups so that we acquire information that we can teach students so we have that dual role of teachers and industry experts.”
“It’s really about valuing the person before you even talk about their symptoms
Eileen Newman Townsville TAFE mental-health team