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# 3 Self-management and study skills

In this section of the course, you will work through some activities that will help to develop your study skills.

As K243 (the Open University course which this course is taken from) focuses on the study of mental health and mental ill-health it is likely that some of the content may be emotionally challenging. The next activity will offer some resources and strategies to support you.

## Activity 7 Skills: dealing with emotive content

Allow 30 minutes

Read the Guide for students studying emotionally challenging content, which provides practical advice and guidance for students who may come across such content.

Make some notes in the text box on the support that is available to you.

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### Discussion

Having read the guidance you will find that there is a description of what emotive content may be and that not all students react in the same way. It is therefore important that you spend time thinking about what strategies might be of help to you. There are several noted in the guide and include applying your existing skills, planning ahead, being flexible, using your support systems, being reflective, caring for yourself physically and emotionally including engaging with things that bring you joy.

## Activity 8 Skills: making notes

Allow around 1 hour

In this activity it is a good idea to break up the time you spend on it to practice your skill of making notes.

Now listen to Audio 3 and make some notes. In the audio, the speakers explore the critical and the integrated perspective.

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Audio 3
Transcript

Once you have made notes, listen at least one more time to the audio and double check the notes you have made. This will include noting anything you may have not heard the first time around.

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### Discussion

Critical perspective

It is important to acknowledge that many of the critical ideas came from the thinking of the time, which was largely from a biomedical perspective. Gavin Davidson mentions leading thinkers challenging those ideas, such as Laing, who wrote The Divided Self (1960) and suggested that some behaviours were a sane response to an insane world, and Szasz, who argued that mental health problems did not justify intervention under mental health law (Szasz, 1961). Critical psychiatry suggests that big issues need to be addressed, including the power dynamics within mental health care and the need for a person’s perspective to be at the centre. Another thinker, Goffman, in his book Asylums (2017), looks at the role of services and how they are organised, which can at times add to the difficulties experienced by those who use them.

The authors of Models of Mental Health acknowledge that psychiatry has had a difficult history and in the past it offered treatments such as insulin coma therapy and malaria treatment that we now consider odd, but there were no other treatments available at the time. Some of these treatments would be considered barbaric by today’s standards; for example, the widespread use of brain surgery in the 1930s–50s.

While this was a long time ago, it is important to maintain a critical perspective in the present day. Awareness is one thing, but we have to find a way to use the process of co-production with the people who come to us for help, to achieve better outcomes.

Integrated perspective

Also known as the biopsychosocial model, the integrated perspective essentially brings together a range of perspectives to try to understand the person in their totality. Also, it helps to move away from binary processes – where the medical model is dominant and other ideas such as the social model are marginalised – towards a more integrated approach that brings together psychological, social and medical perspectives in a unified way. It helps not to think about clinical expression as such, but about a person’s wider integration within society and how we can understand and build resilience for individuals’ support networks and society. It is suggested that the voice of the lived experience needs to be more integrated.

To conclude, there are multiple perspectives on psychological distress, but they cannot be viewed in isolation. For most, there must be some form of valuing other perspectives.

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OpenLearn - Mental health in society
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