◄Previous: 1 Language

# 1.1 Definitions in mental health discussions

You will now be introduced to four key professionals discussing mental health. Also, as a way of developing study skills, you will be asked to undertake note-taking exercises to help you think about the course content as a whole.

## Activity 2 Introducing Models of Mental Health

Allow 1 hour

#### Task A Meet the authors

In this activity you will listen to an audio in which four people, authors of the book Models of Mental Health, introduce themselves and their professional roles and backgrounds. The first two people you will hear are Gavin Davidson and Jim Campbell, both social workers and professors of social care. Next there are two people with similar first names, the first Ciarán Shannon, a consultant and clinical psychologist, and the second is Ciaran Mulholland, who is a psychiatrist.

In the audio you will hear the authors describe the different professional roles in mental health services which they represent. The discussion then revolves around how understanding is still evolving and that the way in which language is used reflects this development. In the audio there is reference to ‘the module’, which refers to the OU course this OpenLearn course comes from.

Before you start, you might find it helpful to refresh your note-taking skills using the following guidance: Academic-skills: effective note taking.

This browser does not support audio playback.

Audio 1
Transcript

As you are listening, make notes on what the authors say about the different perspectives they bring to mental health and their own interest in it. You may also want to make notes about concepts that are introduced here such as stigma. Listen carefully to the discussion about language – this will help you with the next activity.

(A text entry box would appear here, but your browser does not support it.)

### Discussion

Each of the authors in the audio speak briefly about their professional role and how they became interested in mental health. Gavin Davidson for example referred to his own personal experiences. Personal experiences of mental health are an important aspect of this course.

Each of these professionals talk about different perspectives from their own viewpoint including social, medical and psychological approaches. As you were listening you may have made notes on what they are saying about the associated concepts. For example, Ciaran Mulholland talks about diagnosis and how fundamental this is to the medical perspective. Last the discussion turns to the use of language and how in this instance the various ways to which a person who may need help because of mental ill-health may have been referred over time.

#### Task B Online dictionaries

In the second part of this activity you are going to consider language in more detail and also learn how to use online dictionaries.

There are a number of free online dictionaries available to you. Often, your digital devices have a dictionary app, too. It’s down to personal preference what you want to use for this activity. You might want to do a quick search on the internet for online dictionaries and try some out and then select the one (or more) that you get on with best.

Here are some suggestions. You’re likely to come across the Cambridge Dictionary, Collins Dictionary, the Free Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster dictionary. They have different interfaces but essentially work in similar ways.

Make sure you’re in the dictionary section or tab. Then type your search term into the search box and look at the results. You often get several definitions in your results list.

Now select an online dictionary to search for the term ‘mental health’. Make a note of the dictionary you’ve used and of the definitions it provides. Then repeat this process with another online dictionary. Compare and contrast the findings of the two dictionaries.

(A text entry box would appear here, but your browser does not support it.)

In this activity you started to explore the use of language associated with our understandings about mental health. There are a number of different ways of defining both mental health and its absence – which may be called ‘diagnosed mental illness’, ‘mental distress’ or ‘mental ill-health’.

You were encouraged to think about the medical connotations that are raised by the words that are used to describe mental health and emotional distress. This may have already challenged some of the assumptions you may have previously held about the ways in which mental health is discussed and the impact this has on how mental health is considered.

However, the world of mental health is typically made up of services and practitioners who come from the ‘psy’ disciplines, such as psychologists and psychiatrists, and you were introduced to two of these disciplines in the interview. Their ideas about the world fundamentally shape mental health practice and our responses to mental health problems. It is important therefore to understand some of the dominant or traditional models that are used in the ‘psy’ worlds of mental health, such as the medical and psychological models.

In the audio you were also introduced to the social model, an approach which is equally important to consider. You will return to an audio of these four professionals discussing the different types of models later in this course.

In the next section of the course you will explore some of these perspectives in more depth.

◄Contents►Next: 1.2 Perspectives on mental health

OpenLearn - Mental health in society
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.