The Blizzard’s star Niall Breslin, aka Bressie, has opened up about providing psychological assistance to those impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak.
He revealed on RTE’s Claire Byrne Live last night that he is working on an app for people feeling “overwhelmed” by the concept of self-isolation.
He is teaming up with Therapy Hub.ie, which connects Irish people with online counsellors, and Operation Transformation clinical psychologist Dr Eddie Murphy to craft an app that will offer remotely available support systems.
This is really important. We need to create a network of support for people . Any help hugely appreciated https://t.co/YgfFiiT3oa
— Niall Breslin (@nbrez) March 23, 2020
“One of the needs that is obviously becoming quite evident in the last few days is that this is going to have quite difficult implications on people’s psychology and emotional well being,” he told Claire, who last night revealed that sh had tested positive for the pandemic.
“And we’re already seeing it and the reality is that it’s inevitable that lockdown will be announced in a few days and things like social isolation.
“We started to figure out what could we do to maybe help.”
“One of things around the support systems around psychology is it can be done remotely and they can be do be done quite effectively remotely.”
“We connected in with Therapy Hub.ie because we didn’t want to build a platform ourselves, we don’t have time we don’t have the resources, they have already built a platform.”
“So we wanted to bring our resources and our network to them and the idea was to reach out to the accredited psychologists and therapists and counsellors around the country and get them involved on this psychological first aid.”
“Now psychological first aid is not therapy, it’s a support system for people who might be in kind of acute distress or overwhelmed or in that moment where they just need somebody who might not be their family and who might not be their friend.”
“Now there’s a lot of work to do and we feel that we can reach hopefully quite a lot of people with this platform.”
