General News
5 July, 2022
Former Tech teacher takes on challenge
A RETIRED Cobden school teacher has been invited to present a paper at a First Nations Mental Health Conference in Cairns next month.
A RETIRED Cobden school teacher has been invited to present a paper at a First Nations Mental Health Conference in Cairns next month.
Merv Edmunds left Cobden Technical School after more than 20 years teaching before taking up post graduate study in the UK to become the first Australian qualified in a radicaly new approach to mental health.
He has retired from private practice and his extensive training schedule but still finds time to respond to individual health care practitioners.
One such practitioner, Veronica Williams, runs a training organization in Katherine responsible for professional development for health care workers in the Northern Territory.
These health care workers from Eastern Arnhem Land, known as ‘the sun come up mob’, are tasked with responding to the many complex mental health issues in their remote indigenous communities.
Aware of the many disappointing attempts to better equip these frontline workers, Ms Williams was determined to search for new approaches seen to be getting better results in dealing with depression, anxiety, trauma and abuse.
She read of the Human Givens (so called because it is a model based solely on ‘givens’ – foundational truths rather than ideas and assumptions) and taken by its documented success in the UK, she was surprised to find later that Mr Edmunds has had many years’ experience in therapeutic and training settings.
Ms William’s search has been fortunate on a number of levels.
Mr Edmunds was principal in a boarding school for indigenous teenagers in the Northern Territory, many from the same remote communities her trainees come from.
He knew the settings well, and was familiar with the threads of dysfunction weaving a tapestry of despair in the communities. He too, realised a new approach was needed.
Lock-downs and border closures meant Mr Edmunds could not travel and take part in the training sessions last year, so he prepared videos and ran Zoom sessions for the health workers.
He said it had been successful, and more sessions have been planned for this year, with a particular focus on therapeutic storytelling.
This is the topic Mr Edmunds will address at the conference next month.
“It is probably not surprising that the training has been so successful,” he said.
“Understanding that emotion comes before thought, and that stories, or the metaphors embedded in them, are the language of the emotional brain, raises the prospect of more effective intervention.Particularly in cultures that still have an affinity with stories.”