Welcome to your new course on “Postnatal Mental Health: how to support families after birth”. This course is unique. The ideas and theories and infomation outlined here is designed to change how you feel about working with families in the perinatal period, supporting their mental health. We don’t really spend too much time on what you know because you can do that for yourself with some good engine searches and some time. But changing how you feel is more difficult. Working with people’s mental health can be stressful, can leave us wondering if we did or said the right thing, can leave us questioning ourselves. This course will help you to feel invigorated, excited and confident about working with people who are struggling with their mental health in the perinatal period.
Some information about the format: The course is broken down into 5 modules. Each module has its own learning objectives, and each module has a main power-point presentation of about an hour. In addition, each module has a variety of fun audio exercises for you, quizzes and questionnaires, and an opportunity for reflecting on what you have learnt. You will be guided through these one by one. Each module should take you between an hour, and an hour and a quarter to complete. So in all, the course takes between 5 and 6 hours to complete, but you can break this down into as many sessions as you like, to suit your life-style.
Before you start: you are invited to fill out this self-report measure. This gives you a guide as to how confident and relaxed you feel about working with people with mental health problems at the current time. You will then be invited to fill it out again after you have completed the course, to give you an opportunity to see how much your feelings about working with perinatal mental health has shifted for you. I sincerely hope you will see a positive shift in your confidence, your passion and your keen-ness to work with these families at such a precious time in their journeys.