About the Course
Starting a Conversation About Mental Health (for Students) is a 60-minute online, self-paced, and non-facilitated course. It provides foundational mental health and wellness training to help students support their peers who may be struggling with stress and distress. Through this course, learners will:
- Explore different mental health and wellness models
- Consider the language they use when talking about mental health and mental illness
- Examine the stress response and learn more about managing stress and keeping things in balance
- Discover ways to respond in an empathetic way to other students who are struggling with stress and mental health
- Consider how to maintain boundaries and practice self-care when supporting a student in distress
While this course covers how to refer a student who is having a mental health emergency or crisis to appropriate resources, this course does not address suicide awareness, which requires more in-depth training. BCcampus has developed a facilitator-led courses on suicide awareness. For more information, the BCcampus Mental Health and Wellness.
Starting a Conversation About Mental Health (for Students) was adapted from the BCcampus synchronous resource Starting a Conversation About Mental Health: Foundational Training for Students, which is a facilitator’s guide for delivering in-person or online mental health and wellness training to post-secondary students.
The asynchronous, self-paced version of the course was developed to meet the needs of post-secondary institutions unable to reach all learners through synchronous workshops. It covers the same concepts and has the same learning outcomes as the synchronous, facilitated version of the course.
Both versions of the Starting a Conversation About Mental Health courses were developed with guidance from an advisory group of students, staff, and faculty from B.C. post-secondary institutions. The courses were also developed in close collaboration with an Indigenous advisor, and Indigenous knowledge about mental health has been integrated into all the materials.
Key Principles
This course was developed following the six key principles identified in the Framework for Evaluating Mental Health and Wellness Education and Training Resources. The principles ensure the training is:
Course Structure and Topics
- Starting a Conversation About Mental Health includes an introduction, four modules, a course summary, and downloadable PDF resources.
- The modules include interactive activities, videos, ungraded quizzes, key learning points, and reflection questions.
- Each module finishes with a short, ungraded knowledge check (quiz).
- The resource section at the end of the course contains handouts for learners to download.
- The course can be completed in one or more sessions.
Note: The course does not include any graded assessments such as a final quiz. Institutions wanting to add formal assessments can create them in Articulate Rise and incorporate them into