Introduction and guidance

This 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.

While studying Introduction to adolescent mental health you have the option to work towards gaining a digital badge.

Badged courses are a key part of The Open University’s mission to promote the educational wellbeing of the community. The courses also provide another way of helping you to progress from informal to formal learning.

Completing a course will require about 24 hours of study time. However, you can study the course at any time and at a pace to suit you.

Badged courses are available on The Open University’s OpenLearn Create and OpenLearn websites and do not cost anything to study. They differ from Open University courses because you do not receive support from a tutor, but you do get useful feedback from the interactive quizzes.

What is a badge?

Digital badges are a new way of demonstrating online that you have gained a skill. Colleges and universities are working with employers and other organisations to develop open badges that help learners gain recognition for their skills, and support employers to identify the right candidate for a job.

Badges demonstrate your work and achievement on the course. You can share your achievement with friends, family and employers, and on social media. Badges are a great motivation, helping you to reach the end of the course. Gaining a badge often boosts confidence in the skills and abilities that underpin successful study. So, completing this course could encourage you to think about taking other courses.

Getting a badge is straightforward! Here’s what you have to do:

• read each session of the course
• score 50% or more in the two badge quizzes in Session 4 and Session 8.

For all the quizzes, you can have three attempts at most of the questions (for true or false type questions you usually only get one attempt). If you get the answer right first time you will get more marks than for a correct answer the second or third time. Therefore, please be aware that for the two badge quizzes it is possible to get all the questions right but not score 50% and be eligible for the badge on that attempt. If one of your answers is incorrect you will often receive helpful feedback and suggestions about how to work out the correct answer.

For the badge quizzes, if you’re not successful in getting 50% the first time, after 24 hours you can attempt the whole quiz, and come back as many times as you like.

We hope that as many people as possible will gain an Open University badge – so you should see getting a badge as an opportunity to reflect on what you have learned rather than as a test.

If you need more guidance on getting a badge and what you can do with it, take a look at the What is a digital badge section of the OpenLearn Create FAQs. When you gain your badge you will receive an email to notify you and you will be able to view and manage all your badges in your OpenLearn Create profile within 24 hours of completing the criteria to gain a badge.

Get started with Session 1.