Boost your well-being with a new course from Hato Hone St John.
What if your first, closest and best call for mental health support was… yourself? With the introduction of a new online course, Hato Hone St John is looking to equip people from all walks of life with better tools for enhancing their personal well-being, making everyday New Zealanders the primary source of support for themselves, their whānau, and anyone needing a helping hand.
Te Whai Aroha: The Journey to Well-being, a new course from Hato Hone St John, aims to make well-being a daily practice, rather than a far-off goal. Jordan Shearer, who leads the organisation’s Mental Health and Well-being Programme, emphasises that maintaining our overall health requires consistent effort.
“Making a conscious effort to look after yourself is probably the most important thing you can do – and enhances your ability to help others,” she points out.
This is a long-held principle for those familiar with first aid courses. Trainers continuously reinforce these points: don’t panic at an accident scene. This is not your emergency. You cannot help anyone if you are injured. As a first aider, your top priority is to ensure your own safety before offering help.
It’s a sad reality that Aotearoa faces an ongoing epidemic with almost half of us experiencing mental distress or illness in our lifetimes. It continues to be a persistent challenge that disproportionately affects younger people. A recent Ministry of Health survey confirmed that numbers of young people with moderate to high distress have nearly doubled since 2016/17.
Mental Health Awareness Week 2024 is an apt time to launch new approaches to positively impact our communities, and that’s what Hato Hone St John aims for. Te Whai Aroha translated means ‘the seeking of love’, and Shearer says this means having love for yourself first, so that you can support others with a bit of aroha, too. “Too often mental health challenges end with a tragedy; quite literally, an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff,” she says.
However, Shearer does note that it’s important not to merge mental health with mental illness. “Everyone has mental health, and at any one time we’re somewhere on what we call the Mental Health Continuum. Nobody’s going to have perfect mental health all the time, because we all have ups and downs that we need to navigate. Life’s challenges can and do impact your well-being.”
Since 2018, Hato Hone St John has delivered Mental Health First Aid courses alongside the more traditional courses dealing with accidents and other medical emergencies. Now, the online course Te Whai Aroha: The Journey to Well-being empowers the first aider to reflect on their well-being journey, actively working through each step to enhance their overall health. The self-directed course has six modules to be completed, with at least one hour per module to fully engage in activities, reflections and integration.
“This is a perfect complementary course to the externally focused Mental Health First Aid course. In essence, it’s about prioritising your well-being first, much like putting on your oxygen mask before assisting others,” says Shearer.
Te Whai Aroha: The Journey to Well-being is designed to provide skills and knowledge to understand and integrate well-being practices into daily life while involving whānau and friends. We are social creatures, and good mental health and well-being is enhanced by strong personal and community connections.
“What we’re aiming for is a proactive approach delivering a better result for everyone – those who wish to make a difference to individuals, and society,” says Shearer. “We live in a world of distraction and excessive engagement, with our phones, TVs, social media a constant barrage on our senses. With all that going on, many find it hard to prioritise self-reflection and self-awareness. We lose our resilience strategies. We lose our connections with self and others.”
Boosting your own resilience is the first step. However, Shearer agrees that in any emergency, the greatest source of frustration for any good Samaritan is a feeling of helplessness when not knowing what to do. Given the prevalence of mental health challenges, the likelihood of finding yourself in such a situation may be higher than happening upon the scene of an accident.
Shearer says completing the Te Whai Aroha course and applying its principles to your life provides an excellent foundation to then attend Hato Hone St John’s other Mental Health First Aid courses. It could even be considered essential training providing deeper self-awareness, while benefiting from techniques that can help other people.
With some pride, Shearer says there is growing recognition of the necessity for mental health first aid. Last year alone more than 6000 people across the motu took Hato Hone St John’s Mental Health First Aid courses, bringing the total to more than 24,000 since introduction. “And now with Te Whai Aroha course, we’re providing a perfect foundation that helps people do well by themselves and those closest to them.”
For more information or to book an online or in-class course, visit Hato Hone St John’s website or call 0800 STJOHN (0800 785 646).