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RCPS Needs Volunteer Peer Support Providers to help support those in our community.
Our Community Education Program
Our Community Education Program
One area of our mission is to promote and create awareness and safety within ourselves and our communities that we live in. Two critical objectives for accomplishing this is to work toward destigmatising mental health within ourselves and within our communities, the other is eliminating barriers for equitable access to mental health support.
Our, Community Education, mission is to provide training workshops, and information to our community. We hope to work with law enforcement agencies, schools, hospitals, and other agencies to provide mental health training facilitated by peers with lived experience to help eliminate stigma, help each other understand mental health and how to best support those experiencing mental health challenges, and promote and create awareness and safety in ourselves and our communities.
The Trainings We Provide:
The Trainings We Provide:
We offer our training workshops onsite (following our covid-19 policy) and remotely via Zoom.
Mental Health Community Support: (An alternative to Mental Health First Aid™)
Mental Health Community Support: (An alternative to Mental Health First Aid™)
A three-day course in understanding the prominence of mental health challenges in America, understanding the most common mental health challenges people experience, and how to provide mental health support to people experiencing mental health challenges and crises.
Law Enforcement Professionals:
Law Enforcement Professionals:
Mental health and crisis intervention training for law enforcement officers and personnel with emphasis in working with community mental health partners to develop mobile crisis teams when responding to persons experiencing mental health crises. This training is designed to reduce mental health stigma, reduce lethality in encounters, and promote safe and equitable supports for those experiencing mental health crises.
Teachers and Academic Professionals:
Teachers and Academic Professionals:
This training is designed for teachers, instructors, and other academic professionals with an overview of mental health, crisis intervention, and how to support students experiencing mental health challenges and crises.
Mental Health for Students:
Mental Health for Students:
This training is designed to help students and youth learn about mental health, how to recognize warning signs, learn about suicide prevention, reduce stigma, and give students and youth resources and skills they can use to cope with their mental health and to support others.
Medical Professionals:
Medical Professionals:
This training is designed for doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals with an overview of mental health, discussing best practices and mindfulness of their patient's wellness and mental health, and how to support their patients who experience mental health challenges and crises.
Mental Health in the Workplace:
Mental Health in the Workplace:
This training is designed for people in the workplace including management and leadership staff overviewing mental health, recognizing mental health warning signs, learning skills and tools to support your colleagues when they experience mental health challenges or crises, how to reduce mental health stigma in the workplace, and discuss mindfulness and best practices for management and supervisors on how they approach mental health situations with their workers.
We can also facilitate customized mental health and peer support training workshops
Fees - We will provide these trainings and workshops at no cost within Riverside County. We do request an honorary donation to reflect our travel and material expenses, however, no one is turned away.
What is Mental Health Stigma?
What is Mental Health Stigma?
Living with Mental Health Challenges is not a Character Defect!
This is when people view and treat negatively or fearful or burdensome, and discriminate against people who have mental health challenges.
People that live with and experience mental health challenges are not bad people, they are not evil, they are not less than you or anyone else.
Many incidents occur when law enforcement, authority figures, teachers, classmates, doctors, or people do not understand or know when a person with mental health challenges is approaching crisis or is experiencing crisis; nor have the skills and training on how to best support that individual during these moments.
Our goal for eliminating this stigma is to provide information, training, and skills to as many agencies, institutions, and people that are willing to work with us to eliminate those stigmas and better be able to provide support to individuals (peers) experiencing their own experiences with their mental health challenges.
If you are trained and provided knowledge and skills to work with individuals with mental health challenges this can reduce confrontation and harm, violence, discrimination, and you will be better equipped to provide appropriate support for those individuals.
Actions to Eliminate Mental Health Stigma: Things You Can Do
Actions to Eliminate Mental Health Stigma: Things You Can Do
- Educate Yourself and Educate Others
You're on our website and reading this content, that's a great start to educating yourself about mental health, peer support, and eliminating stigma. By learning about mental health and peer support, you can gain an understanding that reflects the real experiences and impact mental health has on individuals and groups of people living with mental health challenges. You can also equip yourself with the knowledge, skills, and tools to support people you know or that you meet that experience mental health challenges and crises. Further, you can use your experience and knowledge to educate other people about mental health and peer support so they, too, can be informed and support others.
- Change Your Language and Choose Your Words More Carefully
The language we use impacts how we think and how we feel, and likewise, it impacts how other people think and feel. Using words like "Crazy", "Insane", and "Schizo" as some examples are very stigmatizing words and are often demeaning and demoralizing. Using stigmatizing language and words can make a person experiencing mental health challenges feel ashamed and afraid to speak up about their experiences and seek out support and care. You can learn more about why language matters Here.
- Be Aware of and Challenge Your Own Attitudes and Behavior, and Don't Harbor Self-Stigma
- Show Compassion and Support for People Experiencing Mental Health Challenges
- Talk Openly about Mental Health and its Impact
- Speak Out and Challenge Others including the Media, Law Enforcement, and Politicians when they are being Stigmatizing
- Advocate for Mental Health Justice and Equity
The Difference between Equality and Equity
The Difference between Equality and Equity
First, we need to understand what the difference between equality and equity is.
Equality is the practice of treating everyone equally, or the same. This practice is often viewed as a fair way to ensure that everyone will benefit from the same supports and resources as everyone else.
Equity, on the other hand is the practice of treating people as individuals and addressing them uniquely by ensuring that the resources and supports they receive is appropriately beneficial to them. This is important because as people we are unique individuals and we come from different cultures and backgrounds, we have different personalities, we have different behaviors, we have different affinities, and we are unique in many more ways. One person may not find the same treatment, the same resource, or the same practice as helpful or successful as another person might. What works for some doesn't work for everybody.
This means that to practice Equity, we have to think beyond what we know and what we have been taught, and instead actively communicate and listen to each person, as a unique individual and discover what will be most helpful for that person, especially in terms of helping that person find success in their mental health recovery.
What is a Barrier?
What is a Barrier?
Systemic/Structural/Financial
Social
Personal
Actions to Eliminate Barriers for Access:
Actions to Eliminate Barriers for Access:
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