- building self-esteem;
- developing a positive sense of identity;
- fun and enjoyment;
- mental fitness;
- building self-efficacy;
- developing a new sense of role and social identity - or replacing the one
that the individual had before their breakdown;
- helping people to identify their direction and goals and achieve them;
- giving people confidence in relation to others;
- helping people to feel part of the social world (social integration).
Collective/community
There is a continuum running from protection against the onset and progression of
mental health difficulties to positive psychological health that enables individuals to
fulfil their potential both as individuals and as members of society. Elsbeth’s
experience was of recovering from a breakdown:
“ Ijust started throwing myself back into my artwork. In the hospital, my brother
brought me a sketch pad and some pencils and he said, Now get drawing
again. Get yourself back again’. I started drawing again. ... It’s helped a lot
because concentrating on what you were doing made you forget your troubles
and eventually everything starts evening out...[ ... ]. It stops me thinking.”
This sort of experience was shared by respondents who had not had recent
breakdowns but who nevertheless had anxieties that learning experiences could
provide distraction from:
“ You went there [to the drama class] and whatever your sort of problems were
you’d got, you just kind of completely put them aside because you’d got
involved in this other thing and had a lot of fun. ” (Stacey)
Effects of this kind - undramatic but nevertheless significant - are a major wider
benefit of learning. Without in any sense being designed as therapeutic, education
helps people get away from the stress of daily life and actively recuperate, as well as
learning something specific. One of its most powerful effects, in short, is the
sustaining effect of learning on mental health and well-being.
Learning can help people to gain access to essential information and help to improve
their own health or that of family or friends. We can identify two principal ways in
which this occurs.
a) Education enables individuals to communicate with professionals more
effectively. As well as enabling them to understand what is being said to them,
so that they can understand the advice, it enables them to communicate more
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