Interview with Shawn Alyea, LPC, on Mental Health and the Community

Times of rapid change and uncertainty are often stressful, and there can be challenges to individuals as well as the communities. Programs exist to help support individuals and provide mental health counseling to communities.  Part of what makes them successful is the presence of committed, compassionate individuals who work to identify issues and to create solutions and safety nets. 
Welcome to an interview with Shawn Alyea, Licensed Professional Counselor, located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

1. What is your name and your background?
Shawn Alyea.  My professional background is in Counseling Psychology and Special Education. I have a master degree in both and am a Licensed Professional Counselor.

2. How did you become interested in mental health and the community?
I was a special education teacher for students grades 1-12 at various times in my career. I taught in inner city schools. I became frustrated by what I observed. Drive by shootings while students were on the playground, a man shooting up in the streets, and attempted burglary of cars. Young innocent students being sent home at night and on the weekends to broken homes that suffered in poverty and crime. Gangs grooming my students from grade 3 up. For me I needed to do more than teach reading or mathematics. While education is powerful it is a long term way out of what these children faced. I had hoped to become more involved with families in order to assist them immediately, and more directly.

3. Are you seeing any trends in adolescent mental health in the last few years?
Trends in adolescent mental health would be addressing trauma through Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy TF-CBT, Reactive Attachment Disorder, Autism and Transgender issues. Heroin use is on the rise, and many of the students I worked with reported Meth use from an early age. Marijuana has become as common as cigarettes, K2 or synthetic marijuana is of great concern inducing psychosis and damaging body organs such as the heart. Alcohol is easily obtainable and often times abused.

Interview on LifeEdge

4. What are some of the ways that adolescent mental health affects a community?
Untreated mental health issues often times express themselves through symptoms of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, self injurious behavior and promiscuous sex impacting families, peers, congregations, social organizations, employers and law enforcement; in fact all facets of the community. Untreated adolescent mental health issues serve to weaken the community in general, to damage their own generation by cutting its potential short. Mental illness often times isolates the person who is struggling from others or may be the cause of inflicting damage on others or self. If untreated it will impact proceeding generations by not being in a position to provide support and care for them as adolescents move into adult roles. And more importantly if unsuccessfully treated those struggling with mental illness will be more inclined to fail as they attempt to raise the next generation.

5. What are some community safety nets that are available for youth and their families?
Families, communities of faith, school counselors, teachers, mental health providers, the media, athletics and other organizations give adolescents a chance to belong to something bigger than themselves. They can find a sense of belonging, value and purpose through these resources. They can serve as a safety net for adolescents who are struggling if they are engaged or engaging.

6. What are some of the main issues with an aging population? 
Main issues with the aging population would be financial resources to care for self and loved ones in a comfortable manner, continued vitality cognitively, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Increased need for a broad range of gerontology services. And a need to be able to provide guidance to younger generations. I believe our seniors often times find themselves discounted, dismissed, and disrespected by a youth focused cultural. They often times work hard all of their lives only to have little choice but to spend their declining days in nursing homes that are staffed by people who are paid poorly and provide poor service (not all nursing homes are like this but in my experience the majority are). They are often times forced to liquidate their assets to be eligible for these services as a last resort. As we grow older the fallacy of a youth oriented culture begins to emerge in our consciousness but by then it is often times too late to share that realization with upcoming youth who do not have eyes to see or ears to hear what awaits them.

7. Are you seeing any emerging issues?
Transgender, trauma and Autism Spectrum issues are emerging at this time.

8. How do community health issues in Oklahoma differ from other parts of the country?
Oklahoma has a significantly high rate of Meth use and suicide in adolescents and young adults.

9. What would you wish for if you had a single wish for community health?
Increased respect for all life from the embryo to the oldest of seniors.


Thank you, Shawn, for an outstanding interview.

Note: The opinions expressed are the author's own. 

Interview with Sharon Brothers, aQuire Training Solutions: Interview with E-Learning Innovators Series

Health care for the elderly is of deep concern to millions of families, as populations age, and younger generations are pulled in many directions, or "sandwiched." Finding competent and compassionate care for elderly family members can be a very difficult challenge. Knowing that the professionals who work in an assisted living facility are well-trained is important. Home health care professionals who would like to specialize in health care for the elderly, or who need to update their skills can now get training online, thanks to aQuire Training Solutions. Welcome to an interview with Sharon Brothers, President and CEO.

1. What is your name and your affiliation?
My name is Sharon Brothers and I’m the President and CEO of aQuire Training Solutions.

2. What is your relation to e-learning?
Our company is an e-learning company dedicated to supporting and training individuals who care for the elderly. I certainly didn’t start out in e-learning, however. For over 20 years I owned, operated and consulted for senior living communities: retirement centers, assisted living and nursing facilities.

Although I’ve always been passionate about education, I only began to focus on e-learning when we began to look for ways to train caregivers all over the U.S. (and the world) without having to be constantly on the road. Even then, we could only train small groups at a time. To achieve universal access to the best possible caregiver training, we began to realize, meant learning everything we could learn about e-learning, and launching this new company, aQuire Training Solutions.

3. What kinds of e-learning are you involved with now?
Since we first began offering a few e-learning courses in 2003, we’ve grown a lot. We now offer a variety of training programs online, ranging from courses for staff working in assisted living and home care companies, to pre-employment training for individuals who wish to become caregivers to a loved one, or as a profession. We now consider ourselves among the small group of e-learning experts in the field of online training for caregiving professionals.

Our newest business division is a licensed career school, the Institute for Professional Care Education (http://www.ipced.com/). Through this school we offer a Personal Care Aide Certification which we believe will set the standard for new caregiver training in this country. We’re working with long term care insurance companies (who will typically reimburse for this training) and a number of other programs to make this training widely available to people who provide care to an elder.



One very interesting tidbit of information is that training, especially for family caregivers, has been demonstrated to measurably reduce caregiver depression and stress, and allow the family to continue to provide care for up to 2 years longer than they could have without the training.

4. How can e-learning train individuals who have to engage in hands-on caregiving?
We’re strong believers in blended learning – in gaining knowledge and values through comprehensive e-learning courses, and blending that with classroom based practice for the hands’ on skills training.

Currently, we offer the only approved online Certified Nursing Assistant course in the state of Oregon - but we only offer the classroom equivalent. We partner with other training providers who provide the lab practice and the clinical work experience components, for a highly successful training program. Our training partners include hospitals, community colleges, nursing homes and career schools throughout the state. This program is helping many, many individuals take the first step into careers in nursing or health care who would otherwise not be able to access the training, mostly due to time constraints for classroom based programs.

We’re somewhat mirroring this program for the new Personal Care Aide Certification course, too. After a person completes the comprehensive 40 hour online course, he or she can optionally add an 8 hour skills training component to practice the hands’ on skills needed for caregiving. This added component can really help build confidence, not to mention solid skills, for people new to caregiving. We’re piloting this program currently in Oregon, California and Arizona, and plan to launch it nationwide in the coming months.

5. What is your philosophy of learning?　
I’d a real believer in adult learning principles. Learning must not only be interesting and engaging, but it must also be grounded to life experience or real world practice. Our own in-house principles, too, are important: the work caregivers do is hard, often thankless work. Learning shouldn’t be another hard task – it should be fun, lively and engaging.


It should have lots of stories (because we love stories) and it should make the caregiver want to learn more – and help her easily see how to apply what she’s learned in real life.

6. Do you see potential for your training to be done via mobile learning?
It sure seems like mobile learning is the next frontier in e-learning – although it will probably be even more focused and targeted than current courses. We’re looking for ways to begin to transition some of the basic concepts we teach online to a mobile learning approach, and will no doubt be offering at least some of our training in this way in the year to come.



7. Please list three books you've found inspiring.
I love to read – anything from a great detective story (I love the Steig Larsson series, "The Girls with the Dragon Tattoo" and "The Girl Who Played with Fire "), to books like "Blink" (Malcolm Gladwell) and "They’re YOUR parents, too: How siblings can survive their parents’ aging without driving each other crazy" by Francine Russo, a wonderful woman I’ve recently gotten to know.

Of course,
"Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia" is a favorite of mine, but for those of a more mature age, not wanting quite so much relationship drama, another book I’d highly recommend along the same vein is Alice Steinbach’s "Without Reservations." Inspiring and wonderful.