Emotional First Aid on Programs: What, Why, & How

This week on the Cornerstone blog, we’re joined by Gary Robinson, LMHC, to discuss the in’s and out’s of Emotional First Aid for the travel and experiential education industry.

Read on to learn more about what Emotional First Aid is, why it’s important for your organization, and how to implement it into your training and day-to-day operations.

Experiential education and travel-based programs offer intensive, often life-changing learning experiences for both the participants and staff. During these programs, individuals are challenged personally as they reflect upon their core beliefs, encounter stressful travel and social situations, and confront some of our global society's greatest challenges.

Although fun and exciting, these programs often occur during critical periods of development, marked by new levels of independence, risk taking, expanded social expectations, and defining of identity. The strain of achieving developmental milestones can trigger challenges, including emotional regulation and impulse control.

As a result, mental health crises are a growing concern, especially for experiential-education and travel organizations that operate in remote locations, sometimes without internet or phones, and thus may not have immediate access to a mental health professional.  

Empiric and anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has made mental health challenges more serious and more widespread. Participants in programs that Cornerstone supports are experiencing increased stress  before, during, and even after their travel programs.

This stress is caused by the isolation and uncertainty that has characterized the pandemic’s effect on our daily lives. To help stabilize and manage these types of situations, the team at Cornerstone utilizes the principles of Emotional First Aid. Emotional First Aid training is a critical set of skills to better equip your organization to deal with the pressing emotional and mental health needs of our students and staff.

WHAT EMOTIONAL FIRST AID IS:

• Like physical First Aid, Emotional First Aid teaches assessment and stabilization skills, and when to hand off the participant to a higher level of care

• A chance for staff to develop confidence and competence in identifying common mental health red flags and to respond to participants in crisis

• An approach that can help staff address incidents of emotional distress/behavioral challenges quickly, efficiently and effectively

• A great tool to help staff better understand healthy boundary setting and define scope of practice limitations when assisting participants struggling with mental health challenges

• A strategy that employs Self-Care techniques for staff and participants to prevent greater escalation of crisis situations

• A set of easy-to-learn basic helping skills

• An objective/unbiased way of seeing adolescent/young adult challenges including training on special issues and populations such as  LGBTQ youth, bullying, self-Injury, eating issues, substance abuse, and sexual assault

• A model for examining the various level of risk in mental health crises and for developing a staff response protocol for each of these levels

• An active, hands-on training approach in which staff can improve with practice, role-play, discussion of scenarios, and de-briefings of critical incidents

• A reinforcement of best practices around mental health screening of applicants

WHAT EMOTIONAL FIRST AID IS NOT

• Therapy

• On-going counseling

• An attempt to change the role of Field Staff 

• Providing medical advice or treatment

• An attempt to make programs “therapeutic” in nature if that is not the mission of your program

All organizations that become members of the Cornerstone Safety Group are entitled to Emotional First Aid training for their staff. Training involves exposure to our core curriculum, reinforcement of core principles through hypothetical scenarios and case studies, and collaborative brainstorming of best practices that fit your needs and culture.

After each discussion, the trainer presents industry standards for responding to each type of situation. Finally, role-plays are used to actively practice Emotional First Aid skills and to demonstrate how to best respond to participant struggles at each level of mental health risk. De-briefings of these role-plays reinforce best approaches to managing increasingly difficult situations encountered by program staff in the field.