A woman in the supermarket is gasping for air, clutching her chest.

A coworker often returns from lunch smelling of alcohol.

A friend is having crying jags and won’t leave the house.

Any of these people could be in the throes of a mental health problem, perhaps a panic attack, alcohol abuse or depression. And chances are, those around them have no idea what to do.

Today, Gateway Healthcare, a nonprofit mental health center in Pawtucket, will announce the launch of a pilot program to teach ordinary people that they can help, and exactly how –– the small steps one can take to help those who may be in a mental health crisis or developing a mental illness. Called “Mental Health First Aid,” it’s a 12-hour course that teaches how to recognize and respond to mental and addiction problems in colleagues, friends and strangers.

Mental Health First Aid was invented in Australia by a nurse and psychologist who realized that people are more likely to encounter someone stricken with anxiety than someone in need of CPR. The first Mental Health First Aid course was offered in 2000, and since then thousands of Australians have been trained.

Now Mental Health First Aid is coming to the United States, under the auspices of the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare, the national trade group for community mental health centers like Gateway.

Gateway Healthcare is one of seven pilot sites for the program. Two employees have been trained to teach Mental Health First Aid and their first students will be a group of municipal police officers.

Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island has agreed to donate $20,000 now and an additional $20,000 in six months to pay for about 10 courses. Gateway hopes to offer the 12-hour course to other first responders, as well as teachers, health-care workers, human-resource professionals and the general public.

Richard Leclerc, Gateway president, said the goal is not just to help people in crisis but also to increase public understanding and fight the stigma associated with mental illness. “We build a knowledge base,” he said. “The whole stigma is based on fear, on lack of knowledge.” If people can come to regard a panic attack in the same way they see a broken limb, they may be more accepting of people with mental illness, he said.

Participants will learn about the symptoms of and treatments for depression, anxiety disorders, psychosis and addiction. They are taught five steps: to assess the risk of suicide or harm, to listen nonjudgmentally, to give reassurance and information, to encourage the person to get professional help, and to encourage self-help strategies.

Just as medical first aid doesn’t train one to be doctor, Mental Health First Aid doesn’t turn people into therapists; the course’s graduates can’t diagnose or treat mental illness, but they can ease someone along until professional help can be obtained.

Studies of the program’s effects in Australia found that people who underwent the training were better able to recognize the symptoms of mental illness, had confidence in their ability to help people, did in fact offer help, and even found improvement in their own mental health. No one has evaluated, however, whether recipients of the “first aid” actually benefit from it. But there was no evidence of any harm, or of anyone reaching beyond their expertise.

Vivian Weisman, executive director of the Mental Health Association of Rhode Island, welcomed the program as another way to educate the public and encourage people to seek help. “It’s not a panacea,” she said. “This is one piece.”

But Chaz Gross, executive director of NAMI-RI (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill), says that Mental Health First Aid, by encouraging people to seek professional help, is pushing them into a system that is ill-equipped to care for the clientele it already has. His agency, he said, took 1,000 calls last year from people who having trouble getting care for mental illness. “You’re taking a mental health system that’s basically broken and funneling even more people into that,” he said. “We should put our efforts more toward fixing the current mental health system that we have.”

Gross also questions whether the public will accept just anybody intervening in mental health issues, and whether the people trained can deal with the pressure of possibly making a mistake.

He also criticizes Mental Health First Aid for never consulting with the consumers, the recipients of the help. “This is another example of [providers] not listening to consumers, sort of forcing something on them.”

The first people to undergo Mental Health First Aid training in Rhode Island –– among the first in the country to receive the training –– will be about 25 police officers invited to a two-day course next month sponsored by the Rhode Island Municipal Police Academy.

Chief Anthony J. Silva, the academy’s executive director, said the course was already under discussion before two recent incidents, in East Providence and Pawtucket, in which men with schizophrenia died after violent encounters with the police. In one case, the man was shot by a police officer; in the other, the man died after a struggle.

Asked whether Mental Health First Aid training could have prevented those deaths, Silva said he didn’t think so. “Those decisions are made in nanoseconds,” he said. “I don’t see how training a cop would have helped in either one of those situations.”

Silva said an estimated 15 to 25 percent of police calls involve mental illness in some way, and coping with mentally ill people is incorporated into the academy’s training programs.

The May course is intended as in-service training for people already working as police officers, explained Capt. David A. Ricciarelli, assistant director of operations. At the academy, police learn such skills as how to defuse a violent situation; in contrast, the first aid course will focus on mental illness as a factor in such situations and offer alternative approaches.

“Most police officers are shocked and traumatized by the use of force,” Ricciarelli says. “We’re always looking for less than lethal alternatives.”

Ricciarelli hopes to tailor the Mental Health First Aid program to police officers and offer it once a month.

ffreyer@projo.com