Attachments
Introduction
Learning about PFA as a young person unpacks what it means to be a compassionate friend and more! It strengthens your skills in being a good listener and in offering practical help to someone without making that person dependent. It increases your awareness about your own self-care too. And you get support as a PFA young peer so that you do not have to carry the task of helping someone alone.
This handbook and the two-day training on PFA linked with it give you the skills and knowledge to help others who may be in distress or in difficulty. As a result, you will have the confidence to reach out and offer personal support to your friends or more formally as a volunteer in response to an incident where help is needed by a National Society or other community group.
Why is Psychological First Aid (PFA) helpful?
PFA is a structured way of supporting someone who needs help. It involves caring about a person in difficulty, paying attention to their reactions and how they feel, listening to them, and if needed, providing practical help. It helps to make a young person in difficulty feel that someone is there for them who can support them.
PFA skills include knowing:
• how to approach someone who may need help
• how people can feel in difficult situations
• how to calm someone who is distressed
• how to help someone find the practical help they may need
• how to recognise severe signs of distress and to make referrals to the appropriate services.
PFA can be used to respond to a wide range of different problems and challenges. It is used in situations involving groups of people affected by large scale events such as after a major road accident, or after an extreme weather event such as high winds and floods damaging a school, or a humanitarian crisis where, for example, people have been forced to leave their home. These kinds of events would involve a response by a National Society (or other official responders) and PFA would be provided by volunteers under the coordination of the National Society.
PFA can also be helpful in offering support on an individual basis. Situations may include young people having problems with friends, disruption in families caused by parents separating in difficult circumstances, pressures associated with school, college or work, conflict with parents, teachers or other adults in authority, issues associated with body image or being bullied, including on social media. There may be difficulties linked with relationships with partners or navigating the early stages of forming sexual and gender identity and sexual partnerships, or in relation to sexual or physical abuse including online violence and exposure to pornography. Young people may also be exposed to drugs and alcohol misuse.
Young peers may provide PFA in these situations as a volunteer helper in school or in a community group or college, or sometimes as a friend. Young people are affected by these kinds of difficulties in many different ways depending on their age, culture, the supports they have available and their personality. They can experience stress or distress as a result of daily difficulties that happen or because of larger scale events such as described above. Reactions such as not being able to get a situation out of your mind or feeling anxious for a while about being with other people are natural reactions and are very common to most young people involved in abnormal events. If these reactions continue over a long period of time however, it is likely that specialist support is needed.