TTBH Mental Health First Aid Expansion Project - The Tropical Texas Behavioral Health Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) Expansion project will focus on providing training opportunities to individuals residing in the Hidalgo, Willacy and Cameron counties in Texas (known as the Rio Grande Valley or 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 population of care will be individuals with mental disorders, particularly individuals with serious mental illness and/or serious emotional disturbance.
The need to increase MHFA training to community stakeholders from non-academic or clinical backgrounds is supported by 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 issues and barriers related to access of care in the border region of South Texas, supports the need to provide MHFA training to more members of the public from settings other than schools.
TTBH has funded MHFA instructor certification for many of its employees, and currently has 11 certified Adult MHFA training instructors and 17 certified Youth MHFA instructors on staff. SAMHSA funding allowed TTBH to provide MHFA training to 265 participants through the MHAT project in Fiscal Year 2019. For FY20, TTBH trained 30 participants. In March of FY20, the COVID-19 pandemic halted in-vivo trainings that were scheduled. As a result, the training platform changed from in-person to virtual trainings. This new platform required trainers to receive an additional training for conducting MHFA virtual trainings. Since the implementation of MHFA virtual trainings for FY21, TTBH has been able to train 44 participants thus far and has coordinated trainings to ensure annual target is met.
The TTBH MHFA 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 for a total of 1000 individuals at the conclusion of the project; 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 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 to be trained on, and further disperse, the beneficial effects to MHFA training.
