Introduction and guidance
This free badged course, Introduction to adolescent mental health, lasts 24 hours, with 8 ‘sessions’. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete a further study session. The eight sessions are linked to ensure a logical flow through the course. They are:
- Session 1: ‘A crisis in context’
- Session 2: Understanding adolescence
- Session 3: Different dimensions of adolescent mental health
- Session 4: Recognising mental health problems
- Session 5: Understanding resilience in adolescence
- Session 6: Supporting young people
- Session 7: Identifying sources of support
- Session 8: Seeking expert support and accessing services
This course will cover understanding mental health, specifically adolescent mental health. It will explore how to recognise mental health issues, including anxiety and depression. You should also gain an understanding of resilience, as well as learning how to support young people to develop greater resilience and self-reliant behaviours. You should also be able to identify support networks for young people.
There will be numerous opportunities to check your learning. This includes interactive quizzes, of which Sessions 4 and 8 will provide you with an opportunity to earn a badge to demonstrate your new skills. You can read more on how to study the course and about badges in the next sections.
Learning outcomes
After completing this course, you will be able to:
- understand the complexity and multifaceted nature of adolescent mental health
- appreciate the variety of strategies that can be employed to support young people
- recognise resilience as a quality and skill that can be learned and developed
- identify resilience markers that can be supported and nurtured
- identity the range of services and contexts through which young people can access support and guidance.
Moving around the course
In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each session, you will find a link to the next session. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Full course description’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course.
It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.
There are text boxes within the activities for you to make notes where it would be helpful. This saves for you to refer back to, and only you can access these notes, noone else is able to see them. Alternatively, you are welcome to make notes offline instead, for example in a notebook.
The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.