QPR Pathfinder Training: Lifespan Edition
This version is designed for Crisis Counselors, Peer Support Specialists, and anyone working with those at risk of suicide at any age.
Pathfinder training is intended to build a new workforce of crisis responders who are competent and confident in their abilities to help others survive
a life-threatening suicide crisis and help set them on a path to better mental health.
Program Purpose
This program aims to train participants to become Pathfinders—suicide first responders who can identify the early signs of a mental health crisis then apply interventions known to reduce personal distress, despair, hopelessness, and emerging suicidal behaviors.
Pathfinders are also trained to provide emotional support, understanding, and compassion to further reduce suicide risk. Through these actions, they may help avert the need for specialty mental health care, emergency room visits, and hospitalizations.
- This training program 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
Like a college course, QPR’s Pathfinder training is demanding and requires a serious commitment of time and energy. This professional-level course is interactive and robust, and employs evidence-based and evidence-informed best practices in the following:
- Basic mental health
- Crisis intervention
- Skilled interviewing
- Suicide risk detection
- Suicide risk mitigation and management strategies, e.g.,
safety planning, means reduction, and caring contacts.
This course will take at least 20 hours to complete, plus the time to read a small book. 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. Pathfinder training is designed to produce a kind of “super gatekeeper,” someone able to do much more than recognize someone in crisis and refer them to a professional. Pathfinders will also be qualified to receive and handle task sharing services from mental health professionals, thus freeing the latter to handle more severe or complex crises.
Following WHO recommendations—and by using the technology transfer of science-based best practices, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and abilities —the Pathfinder program aims to train students in helping professions, those in peer support roles, first responders, care providers, case managers, life coaches, volunteers, and those on the front lines of the mental health movement.
Program Benefits
Since helping others bolsters the Pathfinder’s own mental wellbeing, health benefits are expected to accrue in both directions. Further, the program also serves as an important credential to those working on the front lines of the mental health movement and may open new career path for many.
Program Goals
- Please DO NOT purchase more than one Pathfinder course.
By the end of this course, participants will be expected to:
- Explain how suicide is a major public health problem and the burden of suffering
- Demonstrate the ability 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
- Disprove common myths and explain facts surrounding suicide
- Identify unique verbal, behavioral, and situational suicide warning signs
- Recognize the coded nature of suicide warning signs
- Identify suicide risk and protective factors
- Outline the elements of at least one theory of suicidal behavior
- Demonstrate knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy in helping those in crisis
- Demonstrate intent to act and intervene with those at risk
- Explain how to detect, engage, and assist those in crisis
- Demonstrate a deep listening guided interview with someone in crisis
- Engage supportive third parties in setting up a risk management plan
- Describe means reduction and create a plan to reduce access to lethal means
- Implement a means reduction intervention
- Describe a safety plan and demonstrate the ability to develop one
- Understand and employ the caring contacts intervention
- Explain 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 helpful conversation with those bereaved by a suicide loss
- Describe the relationship between mental illness and substance abuse to suicide
- Define and describe postvention and steps to take to reduce suffering
National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC)
QPR Institute (QPRI) has been approved by NBCC as an
Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 5889.
Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified.
QPRI is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.