In the past few years the world has begun to understand the importance of mental health in society. The stress of student life has also received attention. From attending class, maintaining a social life and keeping a decent sleep schedule. It's with these considerations that the provincial government announced last week that they would be making $75,000 available for mental health training in the post-secondary education sector. Tina Beaudry-Mellor the Minister of Advanced Education explained why the government decided to fund the imitative.

"It is something that we have been hearing about, in our conscientiously offices. Many of us have family members or extended family members who have struggled with mental health issues. And certainly when the Sask party had the leadership campaign it was an issue we heard all over the province."

While $75,000 may not seem like a lot of funding, Minister Beaudry-Mellor says the funding model will have a large ripple effect.

"This is not a great sum of money, this is a relatively small amount of money; but when we were trying to figure out what we would do in advance education, because it's not really a core service for us, we said what can we do that would have not just in for example a regional college, but what could potentially have a ripple effect outside of the colleges".

The funding will be used for training and certification in the 'Canadian Mental Health First Aid' program, and the 'Inquiring Mind' course work. Minister Beaudry-Mellor says the 'Mental Health First Aid' program is structure like a first aid program.

"Mental health first aid is a program that has been offered from Mental Health Commission Canada. It's a little bit like a first aid course that's physical, but this one is about mental health. It's really about increasing mental health literacy for people. So we decided to take that approach that we would train individuals at our institutions or as many institutions as we could in mental health first aid, or in the inquiring mind certification which is specifically designed for a post secondary environment".

The skills learned from the training will be offered to faculty and students. The hope is both groups will also taking the awareness home with them, and into their future work places.