Counselling Corner Newsletter (English) – June 2021

We hope you manage to stay mentally safe & strong during these turbulent times and want to remind you that we’re here to help. Counselling Corner offers paid as well as free services with the aim to improve the mental well-being of Myanmar people around the country.

In this newsletter we explain more on how we can help.

When we talk about stress we focus on the feelings of being overwhelmed or unable to cope with mental or emotional pressure. This can be caused by anything at work or at home or because of the current situation in a wider community.

Especially in the current situation it’s very normal for people to become stressed and it’s important to realize the current situation in Myanmar is NOT normal and this can lead to mental health issues to anybody.

Our counsellors have talked several times about stress during our weekly Facebook Live sessions. In case you missed one or want to have a look at it again or share with your friends or colleagues – see the links here:

 

Employee Assistance Program (EAP) – what we recommend

Our counsellors give interactive 2 hour’s workshops for 2 – 20 participants to do activities to practice active listening, expression of emotions, showing empathy and giving support to each other through experiential learning. Practical exercises are included in this workshop (with break-out rooms) to ensure that every participant learns and starts using new skills in daily personal and professional life.

The emotional workshop works well especially in Myanmar as it was developed in the Myanmar context and helps people deal with their emotions and build up a coping system to support them through past and future experiences. During the 2 hour session the participants learn to express their emotions, improve listening skills, realize they are not alone and start creating a coping mechanism.

If your organisation doesn’t have a standard EAP program in place yet, then this is probably a good time to start thinking about it and ensure your staff is mentally healthy which also helps them to perform well at their job. Generally we would suggest to start with a webinar about mental health and counselling, then do an emotional workshops and afterwards offer staff who need it individual counselling. This doesn’t need to be expensive and for an organisation of for example 40 staff members, we see that an effective package for 3 months can costs as little as 35 Usd / staff member

NEW: 2 hour psychological first aid training

Counselling Corner’s Ma Cherish has started offering a 2-hour CISM (Critical Incident Stress management) training. It’s also known as a training that explains what kind of psychological first aid to give to people who have been exposed to a highly stressful critical incident which could be for example a car accident, a fire or bomb explosion or being arrested. During the training you learn how to recognize symptoms of victims, how to react and what to teach people on how to coop with this or refer for further help.

The training is very practical and includes hands-on sessions for the participants in break-out rooms to learn the basics on what to do, what to say, how to let victims express what they were thinking during the incident and how to encourage them to express their emotions. 

Initially the training was developed over 40 years ago for firefighters and is useful for example for nurses and doctors at the first aid, ambulance staff or first aid staff.  The costs of the training is 20.000 Kyats and the next training is planned on Wednesday 14 July at 10 AM. Sign up for this course Here  or contact Kaung Htet Shin to plan your own date and time with a group of maximum 20 participants.

Counselling Corner supporting 401 persons in May 2021   

Improving the mental health situation in Myanmar is our aim and we are trying to reach as many people as possible. It’s important to emphasize that we don’t only “heal” people but also want to support people to build up their own coping system, their resilience and make them mentally stronger.

Some people need individual sessions while others already feel much better after an emotional workshop. We are proud that we managed to help and support 400 people during the last month in one way or the other. This could be through some of our free programs or with the support of organisations who paid for services for their staff and with it, automatically subsidized some of our free services for communities and individuals in Myanmar.

Our emotional workshops are scoring very high in satisfaction from clients with an average overall score of 4.1 (out of 5) on the question “I would recommend this workshop to others.”

Thank you very much for your support – we hope that together we can work on making Myanmar mentally stronger.

Please do share / like and contact us if you have any questions or suggestions on the above or want to know more about our services. We want to make it easier for people to talk about mental well-being and we need help for all organisations in Myanmar to discuss mental well-being openly with your team and work on improving it.

For enquiries please contact us :
Kaung Htet Shine
Sales & Marketing
Email :info@counsellingcornermyanmar.com
Phone: 09 664 017 251, 09 784 509 916

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