New online course aims to boost mental health
A COUNTY Wexford-based therapist has codesigned and launched a course specifically to help people work through the trauma of the Covid-19 health crisis.
Using techniques to relieve anxiety and work through trauma, Baya Salmon-Hawk (a mental health therapist and international storyteller), and mental health first aider and coach Yasmin Kate Pattison of YKP Consultancy in the UK have teamed up to create the course, with the goal of helping avoid the potential disaster of mental health issues across the country over the coming months and years.
The course, Feel Normal Again, aims to teach people ways to avoid developing mental health issues.
‘It is based on the fundamental belief that we can do this,’ Salmon-Hawk said.
‘The human brain can learn to function adequately in these strange times. It is a matter of adapting and human beings are very good at it.’
According to Salmon-Hawk, students will learn three tools, namely: how to stay in the now and not fall into a victim role, how to discern what is in their control and what is not; and how to manage their feelings with ease.
Throughout seven modules, course participants will learn psychological tools to help them understand the challenges they have been encountering during recent weeks so that they can feel ‘themselves’ again, she said.
By sharing personal stories and relaying personal experiences, Salmon-Hawk and Pattison will strive to help people identify regressive behaviour, while teaching them how to gain emotional freedom, how to welcome change and ways to use positive memories to ground them in the present.
They are also aiming to help course participants overcome anxiety about the Covid-19 crisis and move on with their lives.
The genesis of the course came about in March when Salmon-Hawk lost her storytelling business within two days.
She said: ‘On March 11, the bookings started being cancelled. My emails were piling in and Ireland had gone under quarantine orders. Within two days, I had lost my business and had no work at all. The season had been cancelled and so had my livelihood.’
Using techniques she had learned in her previous role of mental health therapist and university lecturer, Salmon-Hawk quickly decided to return to her first love and create a course to help people get their head around what was happening.
She contacted Pattison and they developed the ‘Feel Normal Again’ course with help from the Business Continuation programme awarded to Salmon-Hawk by the Local Enterprise Office in Kilkenny.
The new course will help people ‘negotiate’ the unusual events of the past few months and discover techniques to ensure an easier transition into whatever our ‘new normal’ will be, according to Salmon-Hawk. See www.feel-normal-again. com for further details.