Mental health teaching to UK psychology undergraduates: report of a survey

Abstract

One of the limitations on developing more progressive applied psychology training is the teaching received by students at undergraduate level. In this study, we focus on the provision of teaching about mental health or its equivalents (e.g. abnormal psychology and clinical psychology) on UK undergraduate psychology programmes. Most students who go on to train as clinical psychologists will have received teaching on modules like these. A survey questionnaire was sent to 109 university departments which might offer a module in mental health and 348 individuals who might be involved in delivering such modules. The majority of programmes responding offered a mental health module which was available each year as an optional subject. A number of findings on the content and delivery of the modules are reported and a number of recommendations are made including more involvement from practitioners and service users. KeywordsMental health teaching; applied psychology training; clinical psychology training; abnormal psychology Despite their obvious interconnections, social and clinical psychology are often seen as relatively distinct and separate fields -a separation that, for many psychologists, begins with their undergraduate training. This separation reproduces the culturally normative dualisms between individual and society and mind and body, which organize the fracturing of psychology into relatively autonomous subdisciplines. Thus, in the undergraduate curriculum social and biological psychology are typically clearly distinguished from each other, and both are frequently organized separately from most teaching about mental health and illness. Yet the structuring of the curriculum in such ways does not only reflect cultural commonplaces about what it is to be human, it also reflects the material separation of interests into independently constituted fields, each with their own favored theories, methods, funding bodies, conferences and journals. Whilst this subdisciplinary specialization has yielded undoubted benefits in terms of targeting of resources, focusing of research questions, the development of technical and substantive expertise and the organisation of professional training and accreditation, it has also generated costs. For example, community psychology takes seriously the social dimension of distress and attempts to formulate appropriate social interventions, but its minority status by comparison to the clinical mainstream might stem at least in part from its cross-or inter-disciplinary orientation. And similarly, the hierarchical distinctions between pure and applied research rest at least in part upon notions of disciplinary purity that eschew the necessary contaminations of applied study. It is for such reasons that the undergraduate teaching of issues such as mental health and illness -which cut across the boundaries between social and clinical, pure and applied psychology -might be of particular relevance to readers of this journal. 3Clinical psychology, like other applied psychology discipline...

Consumer involvement in the tertiary‐level education of mental health professionals: A systematic review

“…In a survey of university departments offering mental health modules to psychology undergraduates in the UK, 50% of the respondents indicated that greater input from consumers would be valuable to improving their courses (Cromby et al . ). When the survey was undertaken, only two of the 66 psychology programs (3%) involved consumers as guest speakers.…”

“…In a study of undergraduate psychology programs in the UK (Cromby et al . ), only two of the 66 programs included mental health consumers as guest speakers. In psychiatry, 23 of 90 (26%) trainees in the Babu et al .…”

“…; Cromby et al . ; McAndrew & Samociuk ; McGarry & Thom ). In a study of 52 senior house officers and 38 specialist registrars undertaking postgraduate training in psychiatry (23 of whom had reported no consumer involvement in their training), most trainees (84%) perceived that training from consumers/carers would help them to become better psychiatrists (Babu et al .…”

On the persistence of psychiatric diagnosis: Moving beyond a zombie classification system

“…John Cromby, Paula Reavey and I conducted a survey of ‘abnormal psychology’ courses in undergraduate psychology programmes in the UK with some funding from the Higher Education Academy Psychology Network. We found that, although many teachers wanted to cover alternatives to diagnosis, most of the textbooks were entirely structured by them (Cromby et al, 2008). We decided to make a modest intervention and produce a textbook that attempted to develop a consistently psychological approach rather than one predicated on psychiatric diagnosis – Psychology, Mental Health and Distress, published by Palgrave MacMillan (Cromby et al, 2013).…”

There is no health without mental health: Are we educating Australian nurses to care for the health consumer of the 21st century?

“…GPs provided 86% of these prescriptions and many (58.3% or 12 million) were for antidepressant medications (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2008). As one in five Australians now has a diagnosable mental illness there are fundamental problems with health care interventions that continue to focus on the medical model framework of deficit and dysfunction (Cromby et al. 2007) that facilitates the use of medication as the main treatment intervention.…”