QPR Pathfinder Training

Program Purpose

By finding people early in a developing mental health crisis and immediately applying interventions known to reduce personal distress, despair, hopelessness, and emerging suicidal behaviors, Pathfinders are trained to provide emotional support, understanding, compassion and interventions known to reduce suicide risk. Through their interventions, they may help avert the need for specialty mental health care, emergency room visits, and hospitalizations.

WHAT THIS TRAINING PROGRAM IS NOT

This training is not a substitute for a college degree in counseling or other helping profession, nor can it provide the face-to-face supervised experience students may need to polish their skills.

This is NOT a train-the-trainer program.
The QPR Institute DOES NOT vet or otherwise qualify students for this course.

Program Description

Be warned now, this course is demanding and requires a serious commitment of time and energy. More like a college course, the training is interactive, robust, multimedia, evidence-based and evidence-informed. It requires at least 14 hours, plus outside reading of a small book. This is a professional level course in basic mental health, crisis intervention, skilled interviewing, suicide risk detection, and suicide risk mitigation and management strategies, e.g., safety planning, means reduction, and caring contacts.

Designed to produce community-based mental health first responders able to deal effectively with people in a crisis of suicide, the training is built upon an evidence-based public health program that has been used to successfully train more than five million people over the past 20+ years. Thus, Pathfinder training is designed to produce a kind of “super gatekeeper” able to do much more than recognize someone in crisis and refer them to a professional. In one role, they will be qualified to handle task sharing services shifted to them from mental health professionals, thus freeing up mental health providers to handle more severe or complex problems.

Following WHO recommendations, and by using the technology transfer of science-based best-practices knowledge, skills, attitudes, and abilities, the training program targets students in the helping professions, first responders, non-professional natural helpers and care providers, case managers, life coaches, volunteers across the age span, and those in peer support roles. Since helping others bolsters the helper’s own mental wellbeing, health benefits are expected to accrue in both directions. The program will offer an important credential for those working on the front lines of the mental health movement, and may open a new career path for many.

Program Goals:

There are TWO editions of the Pathfinder training program:

Upon completion of training, all participants should be able to:

• Describe suicide as a major public health problem and the burden of suffering
• Know how to find relevant statistics for their community or country
• Identify their own personal reactions to suicide
• Use proper terminology to describe suicidal behavior
• Be familiar with suicide language use sensitivities
• Explain the common myths and facts surrounding suicide
• Identify unique verbal, behavioral, and situational suicide warning signs
• Recognize the coded nature of suicide warning signs
• Describe risk factors and protective factors for suicide
• Outline the elements of at least one theory of suicidal behavior
• Demonstrate increased knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy in helping those in crisis
• Show increased intent to act to intervene with those at risk
• Explain how to detect, engage, assist those in crisis
• Conduct a deep listening guided interview with someone in crisis
• Engage supportive third parties in setting up a risk management plan
• Describe means reduction and how to reduce access to lethal means
• Carry out a means reduction intervention
• Describe a safety plan and know how to develop one
• Understand and employ the caring contacts intervention
• Outline the elements of least one theory of suicidal behavior
• Describe trauma informed care
• Define and describe self-injurious behaviors and non-suicidal self-injury
• Utilize the book Suicide the Forever Decision as an intervention
• Engage in a helpful conversation with those bereaved by a suicide loss
• Describe the relationship of mental illness and substance abuse to suicide
• Define and describe postvention and steps to take to reduce suffering

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