Welcome to the course!

This course has been written in partnership by members of staff at the Mental Health Foundation and Mental Health at Work.

The Mental Health Foundation is one of the UK’s leading mental health charities and home of Mental Health Awareness Week. Since 1949, we have been working towards a vision for a world with good mental health for all. We use research, community programmes and public information to empower people to protect and support their mental health.

Mental Health at Work is a not-for-profit Community Interest Company (CIC) and a subsidiary of the Mental Health Foundation. They provide organisations with tailored mental health workshops to equip employees with knowledge and skills to remove stigma and discrimination and manage mental health within their roles; enabling open and natural conversations which help businesses thrive. To date, Mental Health at Work have delivered workshops to employees in over 62 countries across the globe. Organisations they have worked with include Coca-Cola, Starbucks, UNICEF, Philips, Nandos and many more.

Both organisations share a vision around the role of prevention in tackling the mental health crisis, and together we are delighted to share our expertise with you in this short course.

Who is this course for?

This course is designed for any professional who wants to improve their mental health literacy to better support and manage their own mental wellbeing at work, as well as the wellbeing of others. Whether you are working in HR and want guidance on writing inclusive policies and procedures, a manager seeking guidance on how to balance compassion with the need for results or a team member wanting to contribute to a mentally healthy workplace culture – there is something in this course for everyone.

How to get the best out of the course

This is an on-demand course, designed to be accessed wherever and whenever suits you best. Although we estimate that the course will take 2 hours per week to complete over the course of 3 weeks, you can slow down, take a break, or revisit content at your own pace. You will have access to the course content indefinitely, however please be aware that the course may be hosted on a different platform to FutureLearn from March 2024.

The course encourages a strong learning community. To get the best out of the experience, we encourage you to actively participate in conversations through the comments and discussions. This will allow you to support other learners, share your own experiences and knowledge, and listen to new perspectives. We hope that you will enjoy interacting with and learning from each other in this way.

As you work through the course, you will of course make your own notes on content that is inspiring, interesting or important to you. We have also created a template for action-planning which you can download from this page. This template is broken down into 3 sections: start, stop and continue. As you work your way through the course, reflect on new ideas you would like to start doing, important work you must continue doing and potentially harmful actions which you want to stop doing and collect these within the template. We hope this will help you to translate your learning into changes you can make at a grassroots level, which will ripple out through society and change the landscape of mental health in the workplace and beyond.

Course completion

All questions and quizzes within the course are designed to help you engage with the content and can be revisited as many times as you wish. At the end of the course, there is an assessment to complete. To gain the accreditation, you will need to complete at least 90% of the steps, and score above 70% on the final assessment. This course is certified by the CPD, as a testament to the value of engaging with this course and the quality of the learning materials.

Trigger warnings

In this course, we will look at the subjects of self-harm and suicide. This is an important part of our training on breaking the stigma and tackling these public health issues, however we appreciate that it may be distressing. We want you to feel prepared to engage with this content and as such, you will see a trigger warning at the start of any step which mentions suicide or self-harm.

Meet the educators

Click on each link below to visit our profiles.

See profile of lead educator, Rachel Grant, Project Manager at the Mental Health Foundation

See profile of educator, Dervla Gallen, Senior Programmes Manager at Mental Health at Work

Course educators will review and respond to comments and discussions periodically. If you enjoy this course and would like to have a facilitated follow-up session, contact Mental Health at Work to arrange this at team@mentalhealthatwork.com.

Over to you!

Now that we have introduced ourselves, it’s your turn! Take a moment to introduce yourself to your fellow learners in the comments. Who are you, and what are your motivations for joining this course? What do you hope to achieve?

You can “like” comments and follow people that interest you.