Promoting Mental Health for Disasters & Community Mental Health Promotion

This 2-hour online interactive workshop is to learn about stress, identify stressors, and recognize personal signs of stress. Several coping skills and strategies are explored, and participants will leave the workshop with a personalized stress management plan.

We have some D-Stress Breathing Techniques videos you can use whenever you feel stressed, or anytime you want to feel calmer.

Look here to see when the next session will be.

E-Prep focuses on the importance of practical preparedness and psychosocial health and wellness in the event of an emergency or disaster. The objective of this workshop is to build capacity by promoting personal preparedness and cultivating psychological resilience. Facilitators will encourage individuals to discuss, explore, discover and develop their own personal emergency plan. The best preparedness kit is created by you to meet your own personal needs.

Look here to see when the next session will be.

Some Emergency Preparedness resources that might be helpful for you include:

- E-Prep Guidebook

- E-Prep Resource List

- E-Prep My Emergency Plan

PFA focuses on the social and psychological support that people need most after experiencing a distressing event, providing humane and practical assistance in a way that respects their dignity, culture, and abilities. These workshops will help participants to understand the most supportive things to say and do and will provide information about how best to approach disaster and emergency situations to ensure personal safety and the safety of others.

Look here to see when the next session will be.

This interactive workshop covers the same content as the general PFA workshop but with a greater focus on the needs of Indigenous peoples in a disaster. The goal is to support both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants build the skills needed to provide inclusive and safe support in a disaster. 

This workshop does not teach participants about specific Indigenous beliefs, traditions, or histories. It’s intended to encourage participants to explore ways of offering support in a disaster that balances western and Indigenous views using a person-focused lens rather than a pan-Indigenous lens.  

Look here to see when the next session will be.

Wellness Exchange is a 5-week series of skills-building wellness educational workshops intended to help individuals increase their coping and self-efficacy through self-exploration and self-management.

• Week 1 Problem-Solving - Learning ways to problem-solve effectively helps us address the entire situation, influence what we can, and increase our confidence in the decisions that we make.
• Week 2 Positive Activities - Positive activities provide us with opportunities for enjoyment, improve our mood, increase our sense of control over our life, and create hope.
• Week 3 Managing Reactions - Learning to effectively manage our emotions is important, as it helps protect our well-being, maintain our healthy connections, make effective decisions, and respond in healthy ways.
• Week 4 Helpful Thinking - Our thoughts have an impact on how we see the world, how we feel, and how we behave. Shifting our unhelpful thinking to more helping thinking improves our mood and reduce the intensity of our reactions.
• Week 5 Healthy Connections - Social support and connecting with others helps us feel a sense of belonging and reduces isolation. Building healthy social connections helps increase our confidence and our overall well-being.

Look here to see when the next session will be.

The five chapters of this learning series will provide participants with a refresher to a disaster psychosocial approach known as Psychological First Aid (PFA). The goal of this online session is to provide a foundational review of knowledge about a disaster psychosocial approach, tailoring it to our local needs in Alberta. Each chapter is intended to help update your knowledge prior to being deployed in a disaster responder role. Visit the Addiction and Mental Health – Health Professionals page for more information and to register today! 

This program is not intended to replace PFA training but is to be used as a pre-deployment refresher of the skills you learned during your original training.

Look here to participate in the refresher to PFA.

This informative toolkit is for first responders, helpers, and leaders involved in disaster and emergency response work, as well as a wide range of crisis support work. Inside, you will find resources and strategies to help you and your organization increase your knowledge and improve your skills and capacity for your personal wellbeing, team wellness, and organizational planning to support self-care.

The Toolkit includes:

• Guidebook for an individual or organizations.
• A workbook with self-reflective activities, team discussion questions, assessment tools, and organizational planning resources to support individual and workplace self-care for an individual or an organization.
• PowerPoint for individuals or organizations with key concepts to use in a presentation or for information to guide you and your organization.

We would really like to hear from you on how you are using this resource. Please take the time to provide us with as much information as you feel comfortable with providing!

This is a mini module refresher session for those who have taken the virtual 2-hour Psychological First Aid (PFA) for a Pandemic – Child, Youth & Family webinar. It focuses on tips for supporting children, youth, and families during and after a disaster or emergency. This program is not intended to replace PFA training but is to be used as a pre-deployment refresher of the skills you learned during your original training.

You can check here for more information.

We may not realize it, but our breathing becomes more rapid and shallow when our stress response is activated (which may happen more than we think). Breathing techniques are widely used because they are effective in relieving stress in the moment. Taking time to slow down our breath and breathing more deeply can help us self-regulate. This can help us choose how to “respond” to a situation rather than “react” in the moment.

Here are some techniques that you can try at home. If at any time you feel uncomfortable, just go back to the normal rhythm of your breath.

1. Even-Paced Breathing: this video contains verbal instructions and an easy-to-follow breath pacer. (Requires sound). 
2. Box-Breathing: This silent video will help us pace our breathing around a box. Please read the instructions beside the video before beginning the technique.

You can do breathing techniques whenever you feel stressed, or anytime you want to feel calmer.