QPR Pathfinder Training: Youth and Young Adult Edition
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.
This version is designed for those working with youth and young adults, ages 10 through 24, especially in suicide intervention roles.
Program Purpose
This program aims to develop participants into Pathfinders—specialists who can identify early signs of a mental health crisis and then apply interventions known to reduce personal distress, despair, hopelessness, and emerging suicidal behaviors.
Pathfinders will also be 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 both evidence-based and evidence-informed and includes training for 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 14 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.
The Pathfinder program aims to train those in the helping professions, peer support specialists, first responders, natural helpers, case managers, life coaches, volunteers, and anyone working with youth and young adults to become part of a new global workforce to help those at risk of suicidal behaviors.
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, first responders, non-professional natural helpers and care providers, case managers, life coaches, volunteers, and those in peer support roles.
Program Benefits
Since helping others bolsters the Pathfinder’s own mental wellbeing, health benefits are expected to accrue in both directions. Pathfinder training will serve as 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
- Please DO NOT purchase more than one Pathfinder course.
By the end of this course, participants will be expected to:
- Describe suicidal behaviors in young children
- Describe the qualities of youth and young adults who are at special risk for suicide, including LGTBQ
- 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
- Define and identify youth who may be experiencing first episode psychosis
- Identify suicide risk and protective factors
- Recognize the role of bullying as a risk factor
- 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
- Demonstrate the following skills in a role play: identifying at-risk youth, intervention techniques and language use sensitivities, and creating a risk management plan
- 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.