-Admission to a private cohort studying Avi's unique 16-hour course in Psychological First Aid -A quarterly Zoom session for all course graduates to drop in and review the course concepts together with Avi, network, share your field experiences, ask Avi your questions, and continually grow together. -Exclusive WhatsApp group community for your specific course’s participants to connect with one another, receive information on Avi’s further courses, articles, videos, and thoughts about how to help ourselves and others navigate the pain of crisis and life’s adversity. -Avi’s Checklist, flowcharts, and review material to keep after the completion of this course to help course graduates continually use the tools learned in the course to approach and assist others in crisis.
For us, teaching this course isn't a job but our passion. Despite high demand, Avi only agrees to teach these ideas in small intimate cohorts, where everybody has access to Avi for questions, animated discussion, and to get to know other students in the class. Limiting each cohort to a maximum of 25 participants makes the learning experience highly impactful and memorable in a way that an impersonal course with unlimited participants cannot provide. Due to the small intimate nature of these cohorts, it is important that participants register as soon as possible. In between online courses, Avi does international speaking, in-person courses, and disaster work.
PRICE OPTION 1: The cost of admission to Avi’s 16-hour online live course on Psychological First Aid is $600 USD per student. PRICE OPTION 2: The cost of two people for admission to the 16-hour online live course in Psychological First Aid is $1000, reducing the cost by $100 for each participant. One payment of $1000 must be made to receive this special price. To receive this special price, the person making the payment must submit the name and details of the 2nd participant that they are paying on behalf of, so that our staff will know to admit them to the course. PRICE OPTION 3: In-person live course in your country, on-site of your organization costs $8000 USD+airfare and lodging. This cost can be split among two or more organizations. The maximum amount of participants for this option is increased to 30 students altogether since Avi can connect strongly with his students in person, a priority for Avi when he teaches. For this option, Avi will be available to your agency on-site for 4 days, up to eight hours a day, altogether 32 hours if desired. Avi will teach additional material to agency leadership, mental health staff, dispatch personnel, and other special staff roles to help your organization incorporate these ideas into your daily operations, to cultivate a culture of mental health well-being in your workplace, and to become operationally capable of responding to small and larger-scale crises in your community as they arise. Ask to set up a Zoom with Avi and his team to discuss your organization’s personal needs and inquire more about this dynamic option.
Whether it is often or only occasionally you will see a crisis at some point unfold in your family, community, workplace, or in the field. You don’t know whether to approach those involved? If you should approach them, how so? What should you say to people experiencing disaster and tragedy? What do you do? Have you ever experienced helplessness, feeling stuck in inaction and doubt while somebody in front of you is doubling over in emotional pain from a terrible event? After taking this course you will feel more confident and be more knowledgeable in the art of supporting people experiencing tragedy and disaster. This course will help you become an invaluable asset to those around you when tragedy and crisis happen to families, communities, organizations, and individuals.
In a relatively short time of only 16-18 hours, in a small private cohort, you will learn these skills and meet other people interested in using these concepts to help people out in the real harsh world during catastrophic events. So many types of common events wreak havoc on people’s minds and spirits, whether it is the unexpected cardiac arrest of a young parent, a fatal car crash, suicide, overdose, or other calamities that unfold before us at work, in the field, or in our communities. We guarantee that if you are invested in this course and participate with passion and interest, you will become more capable of offering psychological first aid to survivors during life’s worst moments. After teaching these skills to thousands of first responders, therapists, community leaders, clergy, and everyday people, Avi has distilled these ideas into a unique, engaging, straightforward, and practical format that you will be able to easily learn and execute in real scenarios on your own or in a response team. Are you worried that you’ll take this course and then forget all you learned? We aren’t worried, because Avi offers a free quarterly refresher session to all course graduates, so you can always stay in touch and keep your skills in shape.
This course is open to motivated people in the community seeking to support others during tragedy & crisis, regardless of your specific professional background. Psychologists, Nurses, First Responders, Military, Educators, and Clergy often find this course especially valuable in their work with the community.
“PFA” or Psychological First Aid is a method and set of psycho-social interventions used by experts around the world to support people during an ongoing crisis or immediately thereafter. Our instructor, Avi Tenenbaum MA, teaches PFA in a one-of-a-kind manner based upon his extensive experience providing PFA to people on multiple continents during wartime, natural disasters, and hundreds of domestic emergencies such as suicides, road & industrial accidents, stampedes, SIDS, fires, scandals, pandemic, and more, while as a mental health counselor, EMT, Patrol officer, PFA provider, supervisor of PFA response teams, and instructor. While everybody has heard of people with trauma seeking help from a mental health professional months or years after a trauma event, PFA focuses on how to support people during or immediately after an emergency or catastrophic loss until one month’s time after the event occurred, which is the window of time often referred to as the acute stage of people’s reaction to trauma. While only mental health professionals do professional therapy, anybody trained in PFA can skillfully offer PFA to survivors during a crisis (make sure to check the local laws of your country). This is analogous to first aid: Anybody can learn how to use a tourniquet on a car accident victim and call for an ambulance, which may save the victim’s life. The initial medical help that the non-professional first aider offered to the car accident victim increases the patient’s chances of survival until professional paramedics arrive to treat and transport the patient to the hospital, where the patient is then operated on by professional doctors. The analogy: Just like regarding medical first aid for a car accident, the first person on-scene to put on a tourniquet and call for an ambulance was profoundly impactful in saving a life, similarly is the PFA provider instrumental and impactful in assisting survivors of disaster and crisis in becoming resilient to perform under duress to effectively lead themselves and their families during life’s worst moments, and gradually bounce back better from adversity. The alternative to giving people Psychological First Aid is to ignore them, relate to trauma survivors coldly and insensitively, judge them, or simply ignore their needs to stand afraid, alone, bewildered, and unsure of how to proceed. Some people are motivated to take this course because they had once witnessed a neighbor/friend/co-worker/sibling experience a highly traumatic event and they felt helpless, not knowing how to assist and support the survivor enduring this loss. Feeling powerless as they watched the survivor reel from raw pain, or confused by utter shock and dissociation, they resolved to learn how to become an asset in similar situations in the future to those around them. Others, such as first responders, community leaders, or nurses, may have once been professionally involved in a child drowning incident/hurricane disaster relief/coworker death by suicide and made the decision to learn how to interact professionally with people experiencing life’s worst moments, determined to be more impactful in the field to those they heal, serve, and protect.
In this course, Avi Tenenbaum MA, will be your instructor and use his unique academic knowledge and experience from psychology, crisis leadership, EMS, and Law Enforcement to give you real tools he uses in the field during disasters to help survivors. Having attended to hundreds of catastrophes as a highly regarded PFA expert, and as a first responder, he offers a highly engaging course with an emphasis on being practical, so that students can walk away feeling more capable of helping the survivors they will encounter in the future during small domestic emergencies (e.g. a high school teacher interacting with teens after a suicide in the class) or large-scale trauma events (e.g. a team of PFA providers intervening in a community after a mass shooting).
Mental health professionals of all types, including those with years of clinical experience, report receiving great benefits from learning this course. This is because PFA greatly differs from psychotherapy in many ways, and is not similar to what is typically learned in University or post-graduate courses about clinical trauma treatment. While psychotherapy takes place in a comfortable private office on a prearranged date and time with a familiar patient, PFA is typically offered at the scene of a suicide, fire, accident, shooting (etc.) on a day and time that nobody perceived in advance and with a patient that may be a complete stranger, and for free simply as a way of offering humanitarian aid to those in crisis. Psychotherapy may last several months or years, whereas PFA may only last for 30 to 120 minutes. There are many differences between clinical work and acute trauma work. This course can add a layer of knowledge and tools to mental health professionals to learn how to apply their knowledge and skills to austere environments and situations. With additional training that we offer in the 6th module of our private training courses for agencies and organizations, we offer a special workshop to further learn how mental health professionals can align their previous clinical skills with the skillset of PFA to support people in their agency in a way that is congruous with all that is learned in this course and PFA work in general.
Payment for the course can be made in several ways. To pay with Credit Card, simply fill out the registration form. For other methods of payment, simply contact us. Bank transfers, Zelle, Bit, and PayPal can generally also be used. Just make sure to speak to us about it first so we can make the process smooth and easy for you.
This course consists of 4 modules: Module 1: Introduction to Acute Traumatic Stress & Disaster Behavioral Health. Module 2: Introduction to Psychological First Aid, PFA models around the world, Historical context of the development of PFA, acute grief. Module 3: Triage, Strategies For Intervention, Common Challenges in Practice, PFA ethics, when PFA is contraindicated Module 4: Psychological First Aid-Provider Self-Care, Personal Trauma Management, Meaning & Purpose, First-Responder Cynicism & Suicide Prevention, Peer-to-Peer aid. Module 5 (Note-This module is only for agencies who purchased a private class and seek to set up an operational PFA-response team): How to train, retain, and dispatch PFA providers into the field during small and large-scale emergencies. Module 6 (Note-This module is only for agencies who purchased a private class and seek to integrate their on-staff mental health workers into PFA-response team operations and to manage first-responder wellbeing): How to use your social workers, psychologists, and counselors to add a clinical layer to PFA work, how to use mental health staff towards building an organizational culture of health and growth, how to assist first responders struggling with duty-induced trauma.
During the course we will provide participants with digital learning material for review, to help retain the main points of what is learned throughout the modules. An oral and written quiz will be given at the end of the course, to help participants demonstrate proficiency and retention of the information learned. Knowing in advance that you will be quizzed and also given information you can use to prepare for the quiz, you will likely pass and feel great that you retained the material. If you do not pass the quiz, we will try to work with you until you do pass. It is important to us that you walk away with a sense of accomplishment and competency. Upon successful completion of the exam, a digital certificate of completion will be awarded to the student in PDF format. You will be able to print this out and frame it if you would like, or share it proudly on social media, letting people know about your new skill: Knowing how to deliver Psychological First Aid to people in crisis! This certificate does not count towards college credits, continuing education credits, or certify the student as a mental health professional. The certificate of completion from our course certifies that you have purchased and successfully completed our 16-hour PFA course. Make sure to join all of our social media to keep abreast of all new courses, videos, articles, events, and content. For inquiries about further questions not addressed here please use the contact page and we will respond to you shortly.
This PFA course focuses on common traumatic incidents that communities & first responders regularly encounter. This includes but is not limited to: Motor Vehicle/Industrial Accidents Fires / Explosions Homicide / Mass Shooting / Criminal Violence Suicide Terror Attack Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Cardiac Arrest Drowning Missing Persons Mass Casualty Incidents & War are also discussed in the course.
Mental Health Professionals Educators Physician / PA / Nurses / Medical Personnel EMT / Paramedic / Dispatchers Law Enforcement Firefighter Professionals Search & Rescue / CERT Military Personnel Emergency Management Professionals Chaplains / Clergy / Community Leadership
Mental health professionals, educators, clergy, EMS, Law Enforcement, Fire, Hospital Staff, and other front-line professionals are the very first to interact with bystanders & victims or their loves ones during highly traumatic incidents, placing them in a unique position. With the right knowledge and skills, these professional helpers can make a lifelong impact on those they serve & interact with during life's darkest moments of trauma & loss.