Fundamentals of Mental Health, Substance Use, and Addiction
| Course Code | AMHW-102 |
|---|---|
| Lecture hours per week | 2 |
| Lab hours per week | |
| Course Availability | Open |
| Description | This course introduces learners to mental health, substance use, addiction, and behavioural addictions as interconnected human experiences. These exist along continuums shaped by biology, trauma, attachment, identity, relationships, and social determinants of health. Rather than reducing these experiences to diagnostic labels or moral judgments, learners develop a grounded, non-stigmatizing understanding of distress, coping, survival strategies, and recovery. At its core, this course emphasizes understanding why people experience what they do before moving into how to support them, grounding learners in a human-centred approach to future practice. Learners explore mental health as existing on a continuum of well-being to distress. They develop clarity in how experiences such as emotional distress, altered perception, mood shifts, anxiety, grief and loss (including loss of relationships, identity, safety, or stability), substance use, and addictive behaviours can emerge as ways individuals attempt to regulate pain, overwhelm, isolation, shame, trauma, or unmet needs. Clear distinctions are developed between varying mental health experiences and between substance use, problematic use, dependence, addiction, and behavioural addiction, supporting learners in understanding these as biopsychosocial processes influenced by risk and protective factors within people’s unique lived experiences, rather than moral categories or personal failures. Foundational literacy is developed across common mental health presentations such as anxiety, depression, intense or shifting emotions, trauma-related responses, emotional dysregulation, and psychosis, alongside major substance categories including depressants, stimulants, opioids, cannabis, hallucinogens, prescription medication misuse, and behavioural addictions. Learners build an accessible understanding of how these experiences and substances can impact thoughts, emotions, perception, and behaviour. Learners are introduced to a range of pathways to care and recovery, including harm-reduction approaches, abstinence-based models, peer support, and community- and culturally grounded practices. Emphasis is placed on understanding that recovery is non-linear and goal-inclusive, and that community members may pursue different pathways based on their needs, values, culture, identities, and circumstances. Core recovery concepts are explored, including concurrent mental health, substance use, and behavioural addiction concerns, stigma, stages of change, relapse as information, recovery capital, and trauma–substance connections. Learners begin to recognize the role of peer support and lived and living experience in recovery and service engagement with community members, with deeper exploration of treatment approaches and therapeutic/intervention models occurring in later coursework. Emphasis is placed on language, dignity, and scope. Learners practice describing behaviour without labelling and discussing substance use without moralizing. Learners are introduced to the role of supportive listening and begin to develop awareness of when additional support, referral, or crisis response may be needed in diploma-level practice. By the end of the course, learners leave with a strong foundational understanding of these interconnected experiences, including how they present, how they differ, and how they are shaped by individual and systemic factors. Learners are prepared to move forward in the program with clarity, confidence, and a non-stigmatizing, trauma-informed, person-centred approach to supporting community members. |