NORTH SYDNEY, N.S. — A new program has inspired at least one participant to come up with a different way to deliver help to those experiencing mental health issues within their community.
Jim Clark, 48, is a firefighter for the Georges River Volunteer Fire Department and a longtime community volunteer in North Sydney. For a long time it has bothered the father of five that while those who are physically injured can usually receive the help they need, the same is not always true for those experiencing mental health issues.
“If you have a heart problem, you have first responders, you have paramedics, you have an ER and you have a doctor,” Clark said.
“In mental health first aid, you have doctors. You have an ER but there aren’t mental health specialists sitting in the ER waiting for you. You may see someone, you have a chat with someone but there is not going to be a specialist there waiting for you. There is a huge gap there.”
Clark would like to see first responders like himself receive extra training so they can help those experiencing mental health problems get the help they need faster. He’s hoping with more accessibility to training, first responders like firefighters could be the first ones to assist during a mental health crisis.
Clark is one of 10 people taking part in the Northside Changemakers Program. The program is holding a series of 10 workshops over six months. Clark is taking the program because he wants to be better prepared to help others in his community through training in such areas as non-violent crisis intervention, ASSIST suicide prevention, mental health first aid and more.
It’s a unique program because it hopes to inspire participants like Clark to make the changes they feel will be necessary for their community.
“We don’t do great in health in general in the CBRM, but we really fail in mental health,” he said.
“I had a thought since we have a truck, we have people that are in the mindset to help people. We have first aid gear, we have everything on our vehicle, why don’t we incorporate that? Instead of generating a new way of dealing with mental health issues, why don’t we use a group of people that are already there but all they need is a little bit of added training? And maybe that’s a partial solution to what we’re going through.”
It’s that type of thinking, of finding new ways to deal with present problems, that the Changemakers program wants to inspire.
“We wanted to develop a program which would not only grow skills and connections from people on the Northside but also really foster this idea of hope and to be the change that you want to see and also be part of creating because there are so many people on the Northside doing such amazing things we just simply wanted to provide a forum to showcase them,” said Suzi Oram-Aylward, program co-ordinator for Northside Rising’s Rising Tide program.
“The program itself is aimed to fund and support some sort of community project while also delivering project management skills alongside a team of other changemakers. As well as designing and implementing community projects they’re receiving certification in community action skills.”
For Clark, taking the program is the first step towards repairing the current system and making it more accessible to everyone.
“There are 800 firefighters in CBRM, there are 2,000 medical first responders in Nova Scotia, and they’ve all taken four days of training and they’re all certified with EHS to be medical first responders so we do that today. What if we just added some mental first aid training to those 2,000 and we started to dispatch the first responders with police to someone who is struggling. It would be a better solution, right?”
Elizabeth Patterson is a health and culture reporter at the Cape Breton Post.
