People would be taught at workshops how to identify symptoms of mental illnesses and help others, developer and mental-health advocate Graham Roper said.
Mr Roper is negotiating with interested parties to run the workshops, which he hopes will start next month.
They would be especially useful in the workplace, where people were unsure how to handle colleagues having difficulties.
He hoped to dispel myths such as the belief people with mental illness were more violent than others.
He wanted to distinguish "bad" from "mad" behaviour, as people often incorrectly associated negative behaviour with mental-health problems.
Behaviour borne of stress was not necessarily mental illness either.
Scenarios in the workshops included helping someone having a panic attack and dealing with a customer making a hire purchase that might not be the right choice for them.
The most important thing was getting people to talk about mental illness, and while media campaigns of recent years helped, there was a long way to go.
Mr Roper said he supported a move to free up strict rules around media reporting of suicide, as when suicide was talked about in the media, people felt more able to talk about it, too. Not talking about suicide had clearly not worked, so a new approach was needed.
A former ambulance paramedic, Mr Roper said first aid was associated with physical ailments, but just as not every injury ended in hospital treatment, not every mental-health problem needed a clinical approach.
The workshops would help people guide others towards professional services when needed, he said.
The programme is being launched to coincide with Mental Health Awareness Week (October 10-16).
Mr Roper said his programme could have helped him when he was younger. As a paramedic, he became depressed about patient deaths and hid the illness because of stigma around mental-health issues. This culminated in a suicide attempt.
