www.linkedin.com/in/chris-mullen-ab596717

Facebook: "Beyond Amazing Training"

chrislmullen@ntlworld.com

07854831824 (UK)

+447854831824 (Intl)

This podcast. It's here to empower truck drivers in the UK with the knowledge, skills and tools to live a much more awesome life. It's not just about trucks and driving, it's about all areas of your life. Money, relationships, health, mental health and much more. For more information, go to www.PuckerTruckers.UK

Chris, thank you very much for being patient and joining the show. Um, it's good to have you. I've really been looking forward to speaking to you. You are a mental health first aider, um, and you've been doing it for a long time, but I've only recently found out about there is such a thing in the last year, year and a half.

So I would love for you to help us understand what it is you do and how you got there. Okay. Actually I'm a mental health first aid trainer, so I actually train mental health first aid and I also train, uh, the Living Works Suicide Awareness Programme as well. Uh, and a variety of other things that I can talk about.

About as we move on. Um, probably best if I tell you my own mental health journey and how I became involved. Um, I'm 64 years old and I come from a generation where in general, men don't talk about the mental health. Uh, and I think my journey, uh, where I, I first became, uh, I problems with my mental health was way back when I was about 30 ish.

Uh, my mom died, uh, when I was 28, quite suddenly. And tragically I didn't cope with it very well. And to be honest, the help I got wasn't spot on, uh, and eventually, uh, went for some counselling myself, uh, and got myself back in an even keel. Uh, as a result of that, I trained to be a counsellor myself, uh, and went on to work as a voluntary counsellor for the following 10 years.

I worked in the airline industry at the time, and because of the skills I'd developed as a counsellor, um, I moved into human factors training, which was... Uh, communication teamwork and, uh, management and it was encouraging pilots and cabin crew how to, uh, work better together so they didn't crash the planes, basically, because 74% of air accidents were due to human error and for people my generation, you'll remember the British Midland crash where the communication was one of the reasons the plane landed on the M1 and not the runway.

Um, anyway, um, I've continued to do practice counselling on and then took voluntary redundancy in 2009. And I started working for some organisations who offered employee assistance programmes. And I was doing some coaching for them, some training for them. And that's when I stumbled across mental health first aid training.

So I thought, oh, this is something I'm interested in and I'm passionate about. So, uh, I then, uh, qualified to train mental health first aid England, uh, which is a licensed product basically. Uh, and they, they tailor it to each country in the world. So that's why we say MFHA England and not just MFHA because they actually have a different one for, um, Scotland and for, um, the Republic of Ireland as well.

So, uh, Started to do that. And then I discovered the, the Living Works, uh, assist program, uh, which, um, focuses on suicide prevention and support for people who have lost people by suicide. Uh, so I, I train that as well. And then I train, uh, mental Health First Aid as a, a, you know, a, an academic subject as well, uh, for two governing bodies.

Uh, also, um, also, I, I work. Uh, on a part time basis for a men's mental health charity where I recruit and train and support the facilitators there. So I'd say the vast...