mhhe hub chat on mental health law teaching

[Jill Anderson]

This thread picks up on the mhhehub chat on mental health law teaching held on 5 December from 1-2pm. 15 people or so joined in the chat and a number of issues were raised/resources suggested. We have agreed that we will have a notetaker for each chat session from now on, as it wasn't until half way through the session that we realised that the first half of the chat was no longer available on screen! If you contributed resources to the chat, and they are not mentioned here, please can you add them. MANY thanks.

 

Summary of issues discussed:

1) Hard information about the law (students often seem to want this) versus discussion and debate re complex, less fact-based, issues (eg power and coercion). Whether to approach law teaching from the point of view of services (mental health law) or service users (mental health rights) - and the latter approach being more ethical as well as in tune with our limitations (as non-lawyers). How to ensure that legal input (eg delivered by law lecturers) meets students learning needs.

2) Social perspectives. Questions for AMHP programme providers to consider: Does teaching inivite people to think critically about detention and its ethical justifications? Are they enabled to question detention or just learning how to make detention bearable? We wondered if the recent GSCC inspection of AMHP programmes sheds any light on this (service user inspectors in particular may have interesting views on it).

3) Approaches to teaching: eg involvement of service users and carers in talking about their experience of co-ercion (Lisa Malihi-Shoja and the Comensus programme); use of scenarios (pre-prepared or drawn from students own experience); use of podcasts (Bob Sapey has been exploring this); use of actors; use of blogs (Pearse McCusker has been using those - they are compulsory and students can then use them as the basis for a written assignment). Does anyone know of any first person accounts of being on the receiving end of the nurses' holding power?

4) How to support students 'use of self' - exploration of the emotional impact eg of AMHP work.

5) Role of practice educators in teaching, and supporting learning, about the law.

6) Assessment. Bob Sapey talked about his teaching on pre-qualifying programmes (BA and MA) where the students are given three questions at the start of the module which they will then be asked to write on in the exam. Bob please can you post those again?

7) Students perspectives: How do we access those?

Several people agreed to follow issues up and get back to us with answers or resources.

 

Resources

A range of resources was shared (do please help us rebuild and extend this):

Mental Health Law Online

http://www.mentalhealthlaw.co.uk/

The Masked AMHP (contains scenarios which could be used in teaching)

http://themaskedamhp.blogspot.com/

CEIMH resources eg

http://www.ceimh.bham.ac.uk/tv/PS3InpatientIntro.shtml

Youtube resources eg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQbxV_6lxjU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRfiTD0-dSo

Evolving Minds

http://www.undercurrents.org/minds.html

Sectioned: BBC documentary

http://www8.open.ac.uk/platform/news-and-features/sectioned-and-men...

These will be added to the mhhe resources on SWAPBox (click the resources tab above to access those).