In my graduation thesis, I am focusing on the experience of students suffering from distress who study at the Faculty of Social Work. In the review of the issue, I have shortly described mental health, common factors of stress among young people and how they cope with it, their common difficulties, connected with growing up and studying, and available help. I have also defined a connection between mental health, personal life, university and knowledge from experience. I investigated how social work students deal with the topics covered by the curriculum of individual subjects concerning their own distress and what kind of support is available to them, if any at all. I also wanted to find out how students’ knowledge from experience is accepted by professors and assistants whose teaching subjects cover students' distress. To gather this information, I used a partially standardized open interview method to collect descriptions from my non-probability random sample of five interlocutors. The interview guide consisted of questions about their distress, its occurrence and what their experience in connection to studying at the Faculty of Social Work was, what their expectations regarding help and support were, what caused additional stress and what from the curriculum was of any help for surmounting personal distress. Through qualitative analysis, I found out that students need a lot of empathy and acceptance from their professors to share their distress and experience. They would want more topics in the curriculum on how to address specific mental health problems and support techniques that could be used both in professional practice and to alleviate personal distress. For students, knowledge from their own experience helps them to make sense of theory and critically evaluate it; in most cases, this experience is also valued within the learning process. The resulting conclusions and proposals will help course providers and the organization of support for students to make all students feel accepted and heard, and no topic will be too challenging to be tackled alone or even deepen the existing distress.
|
