Mhit Information

Alabama's Mental Health Interpreter Trainingproject has been more than 20 years in the making. It started as a "what if" rhetorical question that Steve Hamerdinger, then director of the now defunct Bureau of Deaf Services at the Missouri Department of Mental Health, asked at a staff meeting in 1995. To Wayne Elrod and Jay Wolfe it wasn't rhetorical; it was a practical and realistic question. Elrod, who was a staff interpreter Deaf Services and Wolfe, who was with the Missouri Commission for the Deaf, took the idea and developed a one day training that became the forerunner of today's MHIT. That early effort established some characteristics that have become hallmarks of MHIT. There was considerable focus, even back then, on knowledge vs. signing skill, per se. The underlying principle then, as now, was that interpreters working in mental health settings had to be very competent general interpreters before they approach a highly specialized area like mental health.