SHL FASS 22 June 2020 D241 Exploring mental health and counselling

Welcome back to Student Hub Live, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Curriculum Showcase. We're now going to take a look at the new second level counselling module, which is D241, Exploring Mental Health and Counselling. And I'm joined by Naomi Muller and Gina De Malta, who are both part of the module. So firstly, can you give us a bit of a flavour, Naomi, about what this new module is about? Yeah, so our aim in this module is to try and locate counselling within the broader field of mental health so that students could understand and explore the sort of social understandings and definitions of mental health and see how those have influenced and continue to influence both how clients are understood when they show up to counselling and also the sorts of treatments that are offered to them. And there are five themes, aren't there, Gina, across the module. How do you work with those themes? So these themes are really all central to the understanding of the intersection of mental health and counselling and so the role of mental health and the role of mental health services and what the role they play in society. So you learn about these five themes in five separate blocks and within these blocks you'll study a new topic each week. Now you've done something quite interesting in terms of how you've produced the module. You've involved the students in the production process. So how have you gone about doing that? So we involve students in two ways. We set up a production website and we asked for student input on a couple of topics including kind of early on around what kind of assessments we might use. We also did a kind of crowd sharing initiative where we got OU students to send in to us artwork and we've used that artwork in both the module book and on the module ELE website. There are artwork too but we can see a lot of work from OU students. It's just fabulous. The other interesting thing that you've done is you've had service user involvement which again adds such richness in terms of the perspectives that you've got. This isn't just theoretical. You're taking real life examples from people who've been in these sorts of settings. So how have you included that in the module production? So we've done two things. One we have a book chapter in a week on the VLE that was authored by a service user. So that's somebody who has first-hand experience of struggling with mental health and having often not brilliant treatment experiences. Then the other thing that we have, the painting that's on the book was actually created by a service user artist. Again, we did that quite deliberately. This is part of a kind of broader agenda in this module about holding the importance of clients and service user voices at the centre of everything. Their perspectives are the most important perspectives and weirdly they've often been lost in practice. Brilliant. Now we're going to show you a slide on the screen which has got something that we'd like you to fill in and then we're going to share the answers that we've found elsewhere. So we'd like to know what do you estimate the percentage of people who are living in Britain would be willing to live with someone with a mental health problem, work with someone with a mental health problem, live by somebody with a mental health problem or continue a relationship with a friend who's about a mental health problem. So H.J. when we've got some responses into that, I wonder if you might help share some comments that people have got in terms of A, B, C or D. Some of the estimations about the percentage of the population here and then we can compare those to some data that we've got from the past. Brilliant. So tell us when that's all to go H.J. and no more eating sugar. So the other things in this module, you mentioned the five themes and we'll come on to those in just a second but I just must ask about some of the basics in terms of the assignments and end of module assessments and things like that and the tutorials. Are those pretty much standard in terms of what students can expect to do on a second level counselling module? Yes, they're pretty much standard. So there is study material, there's the module textbook, there's VLE and obviously lots of activities throughout the module. There are four TMAs and one overarching EMA and there will be online tutorial provision until December and then after that face-to-face tutorial. Brilliant and let's while we're waiting for those results look at some of the themes then. So you'd mentioned that there were five themes and one of the reoccurring themes in the module is about service user and client views and perspectives and experiences that are at the centre then of all of these discussions. So how has this theme been woven throughout the module and why is it so important Gina? Yes, so as Naomi said this is really central to the module and as well as the service user and author and artist. Students will hear many other service user voices on this module. So in addition to that there's three client case studies which are filmed with actors and real therapists and they run throughout the module. These case studies and stories will really help students think about the applications of mental health and counselling theory and research to actual people. So across the weeks of the module students will hear the three case study clients so there is Fareeha, Robi and Gosia and they'll talk about their difficulties and what has brought them to seek counselling and also you'll see each of them in counselling sessions. Brilliant. Now Naomi, I wonder if you could tell us what some of the responses are that you had when you asked D241 students about the percentages of the population because one of the other central themes from your module was about the importance of challenging mental health stigma and discrimination. So you asked these questions to our students today. Typically what did the general population say to for example someone living with mental health problems? Okay, so I'm kind of hoping we're going to see the next slide at this point. So the slide comes from a campaign that was run by Time to Change which is a charity that has quite a lot of government funding actually that aims to challenge mental health discrimination and just to say the reason why this is really important is it's estimated through research that the impact of mental health stigma is actually in many cases worse than the impact of mental health problems. To that, mental health discrimination has been described as a public health sort of, I'm not finding the word at the moment, difficulty. So this is why this is a really important theme for us. So these statistics that you can see came from a survey in 2015 and over time those statistics have gotten better but there's still quite a long way to go. At least that's my perspective, I'd be interested in what the students said. No, absolutely. I mean a lot has been done and that Time to Change campaign has done a phenomenal job kick-starting some of those aspects and challenging our views on things, in particular what mental health is. I mean the third theme is diversity within the module. So students are very much considered to account for that in a variety of different ways. Would you like to talk us through why that's been chosen as a central idea also? So one of the things that happens often in one-to-one therapy is people tend to be very focused on the individual or sometimes individuals who are sitting in front of you as a practitioner thinking enough about social. But what we know and have known for a time, of course, is that people's social context has a huge impact on their mental health, kind of bi-directional impact. So to give an example of that, we know that people who are less well-off economically are more likely to have more serious mental health difficulties and we also know, very unfortunately, that they're less likely to benefit from mental health treatment. So this is just one example of the ways in which diversity, by which I mean sort of person characteristics, so characteristics that describe where somebody sits socially and is understood to sit socially, impact their mental health. So we've got lots of examples of that, not just around economics and poverty. Brilliant. Now I'd like to bring in the results of one of the word clouds that we asked about. Think of one thing that's specific for the therapeutic relationship compared to a friendship because we're going to talk about therapy and action now and I'd like to know how students learn about the different counselling approaches and also what those might look like then in practice. So we'll get the results from that word cloud in just a second, but what did you want to come to in terms of those key ideas then, the approaches and how they work in practice? So I'm thinking this might be a question for Gina, but if not, I'm happy to take it, Gina, whatever you like. Can you repeat the question? Sorry. Sorry, no, that's absolutely fine. We're just talking about the different counselling approaches. So I'm saying that one of the things that we're interested in is therapy and action and how students might learn about the different approaches and also what they then look like in practice. So I guess what I'm trying to ask is about how you might teach the various different theoretical approaches to counselling and also how you might enable students to view those in practice. So I think one main aim is to really try and present all the material quite interactively. So to get students thinking about what counselling theory means in practice with actual clients and also the implications of these ideas for thinking about oneself and our relationships as well. So there's a lot of self-reflection throughout the module as well as interaction. Brilliant. But therapeutic relationships are quite different then as opposed to friendship relationships. So let's take a look, H.J., have you got the results from the word cloud about what people have said is special about therapeutic relationships? Yeah, so a lot of people are saying that important things are trust, honesty, openness, willing just to listen, professionalism and a secure environment as well, non-judgmental, not shocked as well, acceptance, receptive, someone you can have total trust and respect in as well and understanding. So there's a lot of different things here. Brilliant. Any responses to that, Naomi and Gina, in terms of the words that students have contributed there? Yeah, I'm really struck by how thoughtful those responses are and actually also how they mirror quite a lot of content that I think students will be learning about in this module. I think when we were thinking about this word cloud as an activity, we were struck by the fact that for many people friendships are really important and they're really important for our mental health. And so there's something really interesting then to ask, what's different when you go and see a counsellor? And a lot of the things that are different I think were mentioned in that word cloud, particularly things around kind of confidentiality and a professional relationship. So I think for me, one of the things that's most different is in a friendship, usually you'll expect something pretty two-way. But if you go into therapy and your counsellor starts talking about their problems, that's probably a problem. So it makes a huge difference that to the interaction. Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And you cover a various range of approaches and things. So you cover, I guess, some of the sort of core essentials, psychodynamic, cognitive behavioural therapy, humanistic, integrative and pluralistic work. And in addition to the client presenting problems that we've already focused about, you also look at practice and relevant issues in therapy. So it's a really broad module in terms of the different scopes and voices that you've used to include it. But I'm afraid that that's all we've got time for here today because there's so much that we'd like to cover and so much we want to talk about and always so little time. So unless there's anything else you think students must know about the module, then I can say thank you both for you for giving us just a small flavour of what an exciting and varied module our students can look forward to. Is there anything else you wanted to add? No, we're just very excited about this module. It's new for us too and we're really looking forward to welcoming students on it. Brilliant. And I know you've got some students who are super keen to get started. It looks fantastic. Well, all the best with the first presentation. I know you put so much work into it. So I'm sure everyone will enjoy studying it and you will enjoy seeing the fruits of all of your hard work. So thank you very much for being here today. We're now going to show you some videos before we're back in our next session. And join me then for our next focus on Economics in just a few minutes. See you then.