Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh is launching the world’s first master’s degree in Mad Studies. The MSc Mad Studies course is primarily a course for graduates with lived experience of mental health issues. It has been hailed by a leading international Mad Studies academic as the most exciting piece of curriculum development in the last 20 years!

Mad Studies is a recognised academic discipline that explores the knowledge and actions that have grown…

Medical discourse currently dominates as the defining framework for madness in educational praxis. Consequently, ideas rooted in a mental health/illness binary abound in higher learning, as both curriculum content and through institutional procedures that reinforce structures of normalcy. While madness, then, is included in university spaces, this inclusion proceeds in ways that continue to pathologize madness and disenfranchise mad people.

This paper offers Mad…

Earlier this year, UUK published a refreshed version of its strategic framework, Stepchange: mentally healthy universities, calling on universities to prioritise the mental health of their students and staff by taking a whole university approach to mental health.

The Stepchange approach and shared set of principles inform the …

Three sample articles are available on the Asylum website: 

Beyond the Pale – Raza Griffiths 

An Illustrated Mind – Kathryn Watson …

Fast-track mental health social work provider Think Ahead will expand its intake by 60% from next year following a government funding boost of at least £18m.

The Department of Health and Social Care has agreed a contract with Think Ahead to increase the number of trainees for its 2021 and 2022 cohorts from 100 to 160, with…

Health Education England has commissioned 11 videos centered on real-life experience of specialists in the social work field.

See the video playlist.

In February 2020 Health Education England and Skills for Care put on two major conferences about the role and development of mental health social work. 

Download the conference report.

A section of the Skills for Care website has been developed for mental health social workers and AMHPs

View the web pages here.

Social workers are among the largest group of professionals in the mental health workforce and play a key role in the assessment of mental health, addictions and suicide. Most social workers provide services to individuals with mental health concerns, yet there are gaps in research on social work education and training programmes. The objective of this open access scoping review is to examine literature on social work education and training in mental health, addictions and…

With World Mental Health Day this Saturday, a new Nuffield Trust report discusses how more people might be attracted to apply to study mental health nursing, and the reasons why they might currently be less likely to do so.

Co-author Claudia Leone picks out some  key findings.

Laying foundations: Attitudes and access to mental health nurse education

Mental health nursing is a vital and varied profession, accounting for over a third of the mental health workforce in England. Yet the numbers choosing to study to join the profession are…

I have compiled a list, with abstracts, of recent articles on this topic. 

Download here

Call for papers for the fourth conference of the Critical Suicide Studies Conference, to be held in Vancouver, 12-13 June 2020.

Deadline is 3 January 2020.

FURTHER…

Trigger, the mental wellbeing publisher, have produced a student wellbeing series.  See link for further details and please post here if you have any views on these books to share with others.

Find out more. 

New Office for Students publication.

'More students than ever are reporting mental health conditions. This brief asks what approaches are being taken across the higher education sector to support them, and what more can be done. Using data available for the first time from the OfS’s access and participation dataset, it explores the outcomes and needs of students with declared mental health conditions. We consider whether universities and colleges are doing enough…

Labelled as the suicide capital of England and Wales, where one person is dying every week, St Helens needs some love, it needs some Madlove…

For the month of November 2019 James, the vacuum cleaner, is combining his own utopian mental health design project, …

Good mental health is essential for students to manage the challenges that university life presents. This book offers pragmatic guidance to support academic and student services staff in engaging with this critical issue, both in terms of being proactive within their role to promote a positive approach to wellbeing, and understanding how to care…

SMaRteN are pleased to invite proposals for small research projects to investigate non-clinical and universal approaches to improving student mental health.



A whole university approach should consider how all aspects of university life impact upon student mental health. In considering non-clinical and universal interventions we have the opportunity to look up-stream and investigate how the context within which students’ study may be adapted to reduce the risk of…

Back issues of Asylum magazine, from 2010-2018 are now freely available on the Asylum website as downloadable pdfs.  A great resource for use in teaching.

More recent issues will go up after 12 months has…