Tuesday, April 29, 2025
4/29/2025
TTBH Mental Health First Aid Expansion - The population of focus for the TTBH Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) Expansion project includes adults residing in the Hidalgo, Willacy, and Cameron counties in Texas (also known as the Lower Rio Grande Valley, the Valley, or the RGV) who are not educators and have not previously received MHFA training; with an emphasis on training emergency services and law enforcement personnel, active duty military personnel, veterans, and/or their families. The need to increase MHFA training to community stakeholders from non-academic or clinical backgrounds is supported by many factors with the potential to increase the chances for serious mental health concerns to go unaddressed. Although the communities of the RGV boast unique strengths, they also face exceptional social, economic, and healthcare related challenges; chief among them, the region’s high rate of population growth and pervasive poverty. The exceptionally high risk for negative outcomes when people fail to seek care in response to the longstanding socioeconomic, systemic, and illness-related care access barriers in this border region of South Texas supports the need to provide MHFA training to more members of the public from settings other than schools (the focus of the state’s prior training drives). Since 2014, Tropical Texas Behavioral Health (TTBH) has provided Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training to educators and staff from several local Independent School Districts (ISDs) as a requirement of our performance contract with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC). TTBH has funded MHFA instructor certification for many of its employees, and currently has 9 certified Adult MHFA training instructors and 15 certified Youth MHFA instructors on staff. State funding allowed TTBH to provide MHFA training to more than 2,250 educators in support of efforts to address some of the negative effects of mental illness on young students. While TTBH also trained more than 700 non-educators over that same period, an average of 180 persons annually, the training was unfunded and likely unsustainable without financial support. The TTBH Mental Health First Aid Expansion Project will use certified MHFA trainers on staff to train at least 200 “non-educators” annually from communities across the Rio Grande Valley in MHFA; improving their understanding of the risk factors and symptoms of mental illness and increasing their confidence in their ability to safely and effectively help someone with a serious mental health need. Additionally, the project will add the specialized veterans and public safety modules to the Adult MHFA training, to address concerns specific to military veterans and emergency service personnel. Lastly, TTBH will work with local partner agencies to identify and encourage community members and members of the social service workforce to be trained on, and further disperse, the beneficial effects of MHFA.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).