Grief, Loss, and Life Transitions (10 Contact Hours)

Grief, Loss, and Life Transitions is a 10-hour continuing education course for Certified Mental Health Professionals (CMHPs) who support people living with death, loss, and major life change. Grief is the normal human response to loss, yet many people who come to behavioral health services carry losses that no one has named: a death, a divorce, a job, their health, their freedom, a child's future, or a loved one lost to suicide or overdose. This course teaches how grief affects the whole person; how thinking about grief has moved from stage models to task, dual process, continuing bonds, and meaning-making models; how anticipatory, ambiguous, disenfranchised, and secondary losses shape recovery; how children, families, cultures, and faith traditions grieve; how to recognize when grief may need clinical attention, including Prolonged Grief Disorder and suicide risk; how to support people bereaved by suicide and overdose; how to help people through non-death transitions; and how helpers can care for themselves while doing this work, all within the CMHP role.