There are more Mental Health First Aid courses than most people realise, and the names alone don’t tell you much. Youth. Standard. Teen. Tertiary. If you’ve landed on this page trying to work out which one is actually right for you or your team, you’re not the only one who’s found it confusing.
Which Mental Health First Aid course should I do?
The short answer is that it comes down to who you’re hoping to support, not what your own job title is. Adults supporting other adults need Standard. Adults supporting young people need Youth. Teenagers supporting each other need Teen. University and TAFE students supporting their peers need Tertiary. Let me explain a little bit about each one.
Standard Mental Health First Aid
This is the one built for adults supporting other adults. If you’re a manager, you work in a team, or you’re part of an organisation that wants staff to be able to recognise and respond to a colleague who’s struggling, this is your starting point. It covers the common presentations you’re most likely to come across in a workplace, including anxiety, depression, substance use and psychosis, along with how to respond if someone’s in crisis.
This is the course I run most often for Melbourne workplaces and community organisations, and the full outline is on the Standard Mental Health First Aid training page.
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Youth Mental Health First Aid
This one’s for adults supporting young people aged roughly twelve to twenty five, so it’s the right fit for teachers, coaches, youth workers and parents. It covers everything Standard does, plus content specific to this age group, including eating disorders and self-harm, because those present differently and more often in adolescence than they do in adulthood.
If that sounds closer to your situation, the Youth Mental Health First Aid training page has the detail.
Teen Mental Health First Aid
This is a genuinely different model, and it’s a newer one. Instead of training an adult to support a young person, it trains teenagers to support each other. Dr Claire Kelly from Mental Health First Aid Australia told me on the podcast that the research behind it came from her own PhD work, which found that young people experiencing distress are often more likely to support a friend than to bring in an adult, even when the situation is serious. Rather than leaving that support informal and, frankly, a bit risky, Teen MHFA gives students structured, age appropriate skills, including a clear sense of when a situation genuinely needs an adult involved.
Tertiary Mental Health First Aid
This is somewhere between Standard and Youth. It’s designed for university and TAFE students supporting their peers, and it includes content on things like eating disorders and self-harm because those remain common in the eighteen to twenty-five age bracket, even once someone’s technically an adult.
How to actually choose
The answer is that it comes down to who you’re hoping to support.
If it’s your workforce generally, Standard is your course. If it’s students, whether you’re a teacher or a parent, Youth is the better fit. If you’re working with a school or youth organisation that wants students supporting each other well rather than informally and without a framework, Teen MHFA is worth a serious look. If you’re in a tertiary setting, whether that’s staff or student leadership, Tertiary MHFA covers the ground that’s specific to that environment.
None of these are about turning people into therapists or teaching diagnosis. They’re all built around the same idea. Notice the signs, know how to start the conversation, and understand where to direct someone from there.
What about Psychological First Aid?
This one trips people up regularly, Psychological First Aid is a separate course with a separate purpose. It’s built for the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event rather than for ongoing, everyday mental health support, and it’s most relevant to workplaces with genuine, regular exposure to critical incidents. If you’ve seen both names in your search results and weren’t sure whether they were the same thing, Psychological First Aid vs Mental Health First Aid covers the difference properly.
If you’re booking for a team rather than for yourself
Choosing a course type is only half of it. If you’re the person responsible for booking training for a workplace, there’s a second question underneath this one, which is what separates training that actually changes something from training that gets a certificate and gets forgotten. How to choose mental health training for teams walks through what to look for, and the full range of Mental Health First Aid training options sets out what I deliver for organisations.
What if training isn’t actually what you need?
Sometimes people land on a page like this because they’re worried about one specific person, or about themselves, rather than because they want to learn a skill set. If that’s closer to where you’re at, a course probably isn’t the right next step, and The Therapy Hub is where I’d point you instead. It’s a counselling and psychology practice, and it’s a different thing to first aid training.
Not sure which one fits your team?
If you’re still not certain, that’s a completely reasonable place to be, and it’s worth a quick conversation rather than a guess. Get in touch and I can help you work out which course actually matches what your team or organisation needs.