,
.
. Office at the University of Toronto
Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. And I'm Charmaine, your instructor for
the course, The Social Context of Mental Health and Illness.
What we're going to be doing over the next six weeks is learning about how the
social environment affects people's ability to live with mental illness and
recover from it. How it effects the way that we understand
mental health and illness, and how it affects the way that are mental health
care systems work. I'm really looking forward to this
experience with you. I worked in the mental healthcare system
for many years, and one of the things that I was always impressed by was that
although we know that illnesses have a trajectory that has to do with the
biological aspects of them, the way that people are able to live with those
illnesses, mental illnesses, is definitely affected by the social
environment. It's affected by things like how they
understand the mental illness and what they've learned about that through their
life. It's affected by.
Looks like their families and how they're able to support them through that
experience. It's affected by our neighborhoods and
our, our communities and how we affect people, how we support people with mental
illnesses. And, of course, one of the things that is
a significant factor in terms of mental health and illness is also the stigma
that exists in so many of our communities.
And that definitely has an effect on how people are able to live with the
diagnosis of a mental disorder. So my hope is that by learning more about
both the history of mental. Will help an illness and also our
contemporary understandings of it. That we all become more able to
contribute to our own mental health as well as the mental health of the people
around us. And that's one of the things that I'm
hoping will be the outcome of your learning experience in this course.
,
. So, there's going to be a lot of things
happening in this course. we will sometimes will be doing lectures
like this where you see me talking into the camera.
Sometimes there'll be Powerpoint presentations going on and you have my
voice over that. But we're also on the Internet and it
seems silly not to take advantage of the fact that the web has so much material
available to we are going to looking at readings that are available, on the
Internet. There's lots of great documentary footage
and interviews and things like that. And that's also going to be part of what
we use to. Integrate, our learning experience here
in the course. I also hope that maybe you will also be
contributing to the course. A really important part of the learning
here, I think, is that we're going to have homework assignments that will give
you the opportunity to apply what we're discussing in lectures to what's going on
in your own life, your own community. But, also the discussion forums are going
to be a great place for us to learn about each other and what's going on in
different parts of the world. One of the great things about being
online is that you can be participating in this course in Canada where I am.
In the US, in Europe, in Asia, Africa, I mean really anywhere and I know that I'm
really hoping that one of the things that I'm going to learn about, as we're going
through this process is how things are done in other places and also how things
are the same or different to what I've experienced.
So I'm really looking forward to over the next six weeks, getting to know what's
going on where you are and getting to know what brings you to a course like
this, why don't we get started?
