Introduction

This free course, Mindfulness in mental health and prison settings, looks at the use of mindfulness in counselling and forensic settings. You will start by learning a bit more about the concept of mindfulness and how it can be understood and applied. You will then consider the different ways in which mindfulness can be integrated into therapy sessions, and what the benefits of these might be. After this, you will explore some of the specific ways in which mindfulness has been used in prison contexts. Finally, you will have the chance to think a bit more critically about the whole mindfulness movement after listening to a debate about how mindfulness is being applied in Western contexts.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course DD310 Counselling and forensic psychology: investigating crime and therapy.

Figure 1 ‘Seeing the light’ by Sue Cheval