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To date, little guidance exists on how to design safe and effective online programming on sensitive and/or controversial topics. Massive online open courses (MOOCs) represent a unique opportunity for delivering inclusive and accessible teaching to international learner audiences. This paper provides an insight into designing and delivering the first internationally accessible MOOC on suicide prevention in the global context in 2019-highlighting insights into best practice as well as pertinent challenges. The results from two runs of this MOOC indicate that there appears to be a global demand for education on suicide prevention. Our practice suggests that new knowledge on extremely sensitive topics such as suicide can be safely and effectively delivered through a MOOC to an international community of learners. Learner safety needs to be carefully considered when developing and delivering online learning. Thorough and careful moderation is essential to ensure that learners engage safely and sensitively with the content and with one another. The involvement of diverse stakeholders, including people with lived experience, in the MOOC design is recommended to enhance the authenticity, inclusiveness and rigour of the curriculum.

Purpose. This paper presents findings from 440 responses regarding the experiences of supervision, coping and wellbeing of 83 service providers and policymakers from 8 countries working to support children's wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methodology. A smartphone app-based survey hosted on a custom-built app was used. The data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The data were gathered in the last quarter of 2020. Findings. While most respondents described the supervision they received as 'useful' – both personally and professionally – and shared several characteristics of effective supervision practices, concerns about not receiving optimal support were also voiced. Respondents shared a range of stress management and other self-care practices they employed but also revealed their difficulties optimally managing the stresses and anxieties during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, some respondents shared they were feeling helpless, unmotivated and unproductive. Yet, overall, responses were imbued with messages about hope, perseverance and self-compassion. Originality. Using a bespoke smartphone app, rich and intimate insights were generated in real time from a wide range of professionals across high- and low- and middle-income countries – indicating the need to better support their wellbeing and service delivery.

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The mental health and wellbeing of students is of upmost importance and it is becoming increasingly recognised that students at universities in the UK are experiencing more mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. \ud \ud Some estimate that up to 1 in 4 students may experience a mental health problem. Some universities have observed an increase in students dropping out and a number of student suicides have occurred. \ud \ud With the pivot to remote teaching and learning that has occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring the mental health and wellbeing of students, is crucial. \ud \ud We have experience of teaching a number of potentially distressing and/or triggering topics remotely on platforms such as Zoom, MS Teams, Moodle and FutureLearn. Such sensitive topics include child abuse and neglect, torture, gender-based violence, suicide and chaining. \ud \ud In recognition of the sensitive content that has been delivered online, we have developed a number of strategies to promote the well-being of our students and ensure as much as possible that the learning environment remains safe. \ud \ud In this presentation we explore some of our experiences of developing self-care resources for students. We discuss our experiences of moderating student comments when delivering online learning about suicide prevention and post-traumatic stress disorder and we present some student feedback about embedding self-care resources in the learning material.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a range of changes on working practices and intra-team collaboration within higher education which have had an effect on the planning, development, and delivery of teaching materials. The requirement across the University to adapt content to better fit a blended-teaching approach provides an excellent opportunity to update and improve learning materials.\ud \ud Since the start of the pandemic, the Global Mental Health (GMH) team have collaboratively produced a range of new learning materials, including a 4-week Massive Open Online Course on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and a 10-week SFC Funded Micro-Credential on the Impact of Trauma on Mental Health, in addition to adapting the existing Programme content to meet student needs. This presentation will highlight some examples of innovative practice which will be useful in guiding other educators to design and refine their learning materials.\ud \ud Remote working has made co-ordination of course development challenging. To overcome this, the GMH team relied on a range of technological tools, including MS Teams, OneNote, and Excel. Previous experience of effective working with the MVLS and Wiley Digital Learning Teams led to a OneNote template for course development being established. Steps within the template were developed, and once a draft created, the content within the step could be iteratively refined by different team members. All the learning materials under development were fully visible and editable to everyone simultaneously.\ud \ud In addition, a regularly updated open access spreadsheet allowed for progress to be clearly and effectively tracked across multiple courses, which helped motivate and encourage team members as they could physically observe the progress being made through the collaborative process. MS Teams further facilitated the sharing of information and requests for help or guidance.\ud \ud The process outlined above has proven equally useful in refining existing course content.

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Despite its seeming breadth and diversity, the bulk of the personal (mental health) recovery literature has remained strangely ‘silent’ about the impact of various socio-structural inequalities on the recovery process. Such an inadequacy of the empirical literature is not without consequences since the systematic omission or downplaying, at best, of the socio-structural conditions of living for persons with lived experience of mental health difficulties may inadvertently reinforce a reductionist view of recovery as an atomised, individualised phenomenon. Motivated by those limitations in extant scholarship, a critical literature review was conducted to identify and critique relevant research to problematise the notion of personal recovery in the context of socio-structural disadvantage such as poverty, homelessness, discrimination and inequalities. The review illuminates the scarcity of empirical research and the paucity of sociologically-informed theorisation regarding how recovery is shaped by the socio-structural conditions of living. Those inadequacies are especially pertinent to homelessness research, whereby empirical investigations of personal recovery have remained few and undertheorised. The gaps in the research and theorising about the relational, contextual and socio-structural embeddedness of recovery are distilled. The critical review concludes that personal recovery has remained underresearched, underproblematised and undertheorised, especially in the context of homelessness and other forms of socio-structural disadvantage. Understanding how exclusionary social arrangements affect individuals’ recovery, and the coping strategies that they deploy to negotiate those, is likely to inform anti-oppressive interventions that could eventually remove the structural constraints to human emancipation and flourishing.

Persistently high levels of homelessness are a symptom of deeply unequal societies. The disproportionately adverse health‐related outcomes observed in homeless populations in developed countries—including their high morbidity, mortality and disability rates—constitute a public health and a human rights emergency (Aldridge et al., 2018). Homelessness is often aptly conceptualized as the socio‐economic sequela of concomitant forms of social exclusion such as poverty, housing exclusion, institutionalization, interpersonal violence, residential segregation, socio‐political exclusion and others. Homelessness and co‐occurring disadvantage can be profoundly disruptive biographical experiences that emerge from intersecting axes of inequality.

Introduction: Suicide prevention is a global public health challenge. Increasing evidence-based knowledge and understanding of suicide needs to be central to suicide prevention efforts worldwide. We aimed to design a 3 week Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to allow students to gain a broader understanding of suicide as a global issue. \ud \ud Methods: A multidisciplinary team of psychiatrists, psychologists, suicide researchers, people with lived experience and digital learning technologists developed the educational content. To ensure a safe learning environment, the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines on safe reporting of suicides was adhered to. Self–care activities were embedded throughout each week of the MOOC and wellbeing resources were signposted at the end of each step. Once the draft MOOC was completed, extensive consultation occurred. External feedback was obtained from a range of key stakeholders and a number of organisations were approached for endorsement or accreditation. Five teaching assistants were employed to aid course moderation.\ud \ud Results/Discussion: The MOOC launched in March and September 2019 with five organisational endorsements and one accreditation. Over 3,000 students engaged in the MOOC with 4,410 discussion comments. Student discussions were monitored by staff. The MOOC appeared to have a global reach with 51% of learners residing in the UK, 5% in Australia, 4% in the United States, 3% in Mexico, 2% in Canada, India and China and 1% in Russia and Saudi Arabia. Completion data from 276 learners reported that 93.5% (n=258) felt the course met or exceeded expectations and 95.7% (n=264) reported new learning. \ud \ud Conclusion: There appears to be a global demand for education on suicide prevention. Early outcome data suggested that new knowledge can be delivered through a MOOC. Learner safety needs to be carefully considered when developing and delivering online learning. Thorough and careful moderation is essential to ensure that learners engage safely with the content.

The mental health and wellbeing of students is of upmost importance and it is becoming increasingly recognised that students at universities in the UK are experiencing more mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. Some estimate that up to 1 in 4 students may experience a mental health problem. In some Universities there has been an increase in students dropping out and in others, more worryingly there have been a number of student suicides. As such addressing the mental health and wellbeing of students is of importance. \ud \ud Within the Global Mental Health Masters, we discuss a number of topics (such as child abuse and neglect, torture, gender based violence, suicide and chaining), which may adversely affect student’s mental health and wellbeing. In recognition of this, we have embedded a number of self-care resources and activities within our learning materials. \ud \ud In this presentation we explore what self-care is and describe our experiences of embedding self-care activities within the learning materials of our taught modules. We present some provisional feedback from students on their views of these activities.

Despite the acknowledgement that mental health inequalities are shaped by the interaction of macro-level (structural) and micro-level (individual, agentic) powers, dominant paradigms in mental health research have been ill-equipped to integrate those different levels of influence theoretically and empirically. As a result, an explanatory ‘deficit’ persists as to the causal mechanisms underpinning the impact of social inequalities on mental well-being, particularly mental health recovery. To redress this gap, critical realism has been put forward as a useful metatheoretical alternative. This paper begins by offering a succinct critique of extant mental health recovery research. Mental health recovery is problematised in relation to its dynamic embeddedness in contextual, including macro-structural, conditions. The core tenets and principles of critical realism are then invoked to address the identified philosophical and theoretical inadequacies. This paper argues that critical realism offers promise for explaining how inequality-generating mechanisms, such as social exclusion, may impede recovery. The analytico-conceptual potential of critical realism has remained largely untapped by the extant mental health scholarship. Critical realism offers a holistic and inclusive set of conceptual tools to re-examine the structure–agency nexus in order to advance mental health recovery and inequalities research, and an equity-based policy agenda.

Background: This study aimed to evaluate students’ satisfaction, perceived utility and engagement with a range of Blended Learning (BL) resources, in the context of the staged introduction of BL within the MSc Global Mental Health Programme. Methods: A descriptive mixed methods design was employed. An electronic questionnaire was completed by 18 (90%) of the enrolled on-campus students. Eight of them opted to participate in a collaborative workshop aiming to corroborate and expand upon the questionnaire findings, and generate ideas for optimising the BL components. Results: Overall, students were satisfied with the quantity and usefulness of the BL materials. Specifically, the easy access to, and diversity of, learning activities were recognised as instrumental in stimulating innovative ways of thinking, in addition to improving subject-specific knowledge. Students starkly diverged according to their reported use of materials as the foundation of independent study as well as perceptions of the difficulty level of the modules. Students reported lacking the confidence and knowledge regarding integrating the breadth of learning resources effectively to support their learning. Collaboratively, the students helped generate actionable programmatic changes aimed at improving the curriculum cohesion and enhancing learner engagement. Conclusion: Systematic evaluation of the initial stages of BL is critical. This study demonstrated the complexities of the staged introduction of BL in terms of ensuring learning efficiency, student satisfaction, learner development and programme cohesion. This study enabled the identification of strategic and feasible high-impact areas for optimising BL, and transforming them into stages of change. Keywords: BLENDED LEARNING, BLENDED TEACHING, STUDENT ENGAGEMENT, EVALUATION

The Master’s Degree in Global Mental Health (GMH) is in its sixth year as an on-campus course and in its second year as an online distance learning (ODL) course. A significant review of ILOs, course content, Moodle resource, the role of graduate attributes and assessment types was undertaken prior to the 2017/18 launch. The optimisation of agility and cohesion between Programmes has provided an opportunity to introduce blended learning materials for the on-campus students as a means of supporting learning. \ud \ud With the introduction of blended learning into the on-campus course we wish to ensure that it is embedded robustly, efficiently and effectively.

Objectives: To design a 3 week Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to allow students to gain a broader understanding of suicide as a global issue. We aimed to introduce students to global suicide rates and explore the biological, psycho-social and cultural factors that can influence suicidal behaviour. Finally suicide prevention strategies were explored.\ud Methods and Materials: A multidisciplinary team of psychiatrists, psychologists, suicide researchers, service users and digital learning technologists developed the educational content. To ensure a safe learning environment, the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines on safe reporting of suicides was adhered to and was grounded in the self-harm and suicide prevention competence framework. Self–care activities were embedded throughout each week of the MOOC and wellbeing resources were signposted at the end of each step. Once the draft MOOC was completed, extensive consultation occurred. External feedback was obtained from a range of key stakeholders and a number of organisations were approached for endorsement or accreditation. Five graduate teaching assistants were employed to aid course moderation. \ud \ud Results: The MOOC was launched on the 4th of March 2019 with five organisational endorsements and one accreditation. Twenty one days after the course opened 2,143 learners were enrolled and 2,825 comments made. The MOOC appeared to have a global reach with 51% of learners residing in the UK, 5% in Australia, 4% in the United States, 3% in Mexico, 2% in Canada, India and China and 1% in Russia and Saudi Arabia. Moderation of the learners’ comments focused on compliance with the WHO guidance. 1.3% (n=38) of comments were flagged and hidden due to unsafe content, the majority due to discussion of suicide methods. Early completion data from 142 learners reported that 93.7% (n=133) felt the course met or exceeded expectations and 95.1% (n=135) reported new learning. \ud \ud Conclusions: There appears to be a global demand for education on suicide prevention. Early outcome data suggested that new knowledge can be delivered through a MOOC. Learner safety needs to be carefully considered when developing and delivering online learning. Thorough and careful moderation is essential to ensure that learners engage safely with the content.