CQUniversity Unit Profile.

In the 1970s, a seminal experiment in the United States of America by David Rosenhan shocked the professions of psychology and psychiatry. It was a paper that asked a penetrating question in relation to ideas around mental illness. It caused a strong reaction and lots of controversy. The paper helped to accelerate the reform of psychiatric institutions and the deinsitutionalisation of mental patients during the 1970s and 1980s. For this assessment, you will write a review of the Rosenhan paper and discuss the controversies that it has created, the challenges it has made to psychology’s notions of mental illness and to consider the implications of the experiment for modern day psychology. You will be asked to adopt a critical, cultural position in your review and thus write it as a critical commentary on contemporary psychological theory and practice.

Your review will contain two main sections. The first section will be a brief summary of the Rosenhan paper and a summary of published reactions to that paper. This will involve you undertaking your own search of the literature to find relevant academic texts that have responded to the Rosenhan paper. As a guideline, you should aim to include at least three papers in addition to the original Rosenhan paper. These do not have to be recent publications, but do need to be papers published in academic peer reviewed psychology journals.  This first section should be no more than 400 words in length. The second section will be your own review of the Rosenhan paper that focuses on the challenges and implications of that paper for contemporary psychological theory and practice and draws on social psychological theories of the self. The second section of the assignment does not require citations to the literature unless you are citing knowledge that is beyond your own experience or other than your own thinking. You should aim to keep the focus on your own thoughts in this section. This second section should be no more than 400 words in length.

• The length of the assessment must not exceed 800 words.
• Text should be word-processed and follow the APA style for layout.
• Use Arial font and double spacing.
• You must include a reference section at the end of the assessment. Referencing and citations should be in the APA format.

The full marking criteria will be in the form of a detailed marking rubric available on the Moodle site. The criteria reflected in that rubric will be on how well you articulate theories of self and other from both a mainstream and a critical, cultural perspective and how well you critically reflect on your own views of the controversies around the concept of mental illness.  You will also be marked based on criteria related to your communication skills, critical thinking skills and research skills. So, you will be assessed on your ability to effectively and critically present a coherent argument and critical analysis on the concept of mental illness and on how well you navigate and codify the complex research literature on mental illness.

Social psychology is an area of the discipline of psychology which offers us the opportunity to adopt a more subjective, reflexive relationship to theory and practice. In Critical, Cultural Social Psychology the objective, neutral stance of the psychologist is rejected in favour of a subjective, partisan stance. Assessment Two offers you an opportunity to develop or re-engage with those reflexive skills through the practice of diary keeping. Reflexivity is different from reflectivity. Reflective means thinking about one’s thoughts, feelings and actions. Reflexive means thinking about one’s own thoughts, feelings and actions through the eyes of another. For this assessment, you will engage with reflexivity through the eyes of the various writers whose work we will discuss during the unit.

For the first eight teaching weeks, you should keep a weekly diary of your learning. The diary will contain two sections. In the first section you should summarise your learning from that particular week (e.g., week 1) in the form of a summary of the ideas contained in the teaching videos, content covered by any required reading and the topics discussed during the online tutorial for that week. This should be a concise summary and be no longer than 250 words.

The second section will be your critical reflexions on that material in relation to what you learned about the role of social cultural factors in psychology, how your understanding of social support and social power has either been consolidated or changed during that week and what dilemmas or inconsistencies you have identified in your understanding of psychology’s approach to particular social issues. You should approach this task as an exercise of considering your own thoughts, feelings and actions through the perspective of the different approaches we cover that week. This section should be no longer than 550 words.

Once you have completed eight weeks of diary entries (one entry per week for the first eight teaching weeks), you will choose the two diary entries that you feel best meet the marking criteria. Pick you best work and submit those two diary entries in one document. The other six logs should be included as a appendix to that document, but will not be assessed. The length of the assessment must not exceed 800 words.

• Text should be word-processed and follow the APA style for layout.
• Use Arial font and double spacing.
• You must include a reference section at the end of the assessment. Referencing and citations should be in the APA format

The marking criteria will be in the form of a detailed marking rubric available on the Moodle site. The criteria laid out in the rubric will assess you on how well you are able to: identify and describe the socio-cultural contexts that impact two key areas of social psychological enquiry; recognise how privilege, power and oppression impact upon the social practices of prejudice and discrimination and the social context of inequity; identify the personal dilemmas you face and inconsistencies of beliefs you have in relation to social psychological topics and how well you think through possible resolutions for these; and, attain knowledge about key social psychological concepts by sifting and sorting through complex areas of the research literature. 

Essay writing has been one of the key skills used by critical social commentators. It is the medium that offers you the opportunity to fully engage with and communicate your critical thinking on important social issues. Throughout history, skilled essayist have been among the most important agents of social change. They are able to combine literary skills with research skills to produce written texts that can create sufficient social and political ruptures to enable progressive social change. For example, the writings of Gore Vidal have influenced the peace movement, James Baldwin’s writing influenced the black civil right movement, Simone de Beauvoir influenced the women’s movement and so on. So, be inspired by the prospect of writing an essay, don’t be daunted by it.

Once you become skilled at essay writing it can become a means for you to find your ‘academic voice’ – a style of argument that both conforms to the conventions of academic practice but also has a unique quality that reflects your disposition, your life experiences and your particular way of seeing the world. The convention that you will follow will be to: cite evidence to support your arguments; provide citations and references to the literature from where that evidence comes; structure your essay with an introduction, main text body and conclusion (no abstract required); and, to identify and defend against the counter arguments and counter claims that are made in relation to your own arguments and claims.

Your voice comes through with the way you express your ideas. The more you stay away from citing too many long quotes and the less you paraphrase the work of others, the more space you will have to hone your skills and develop your own writing style.

For this assignment you will be given an essay title and a choice of three essay topics: Disability or Mental Illness or Sexuality. The length of the assessment must not exceed 1200 words.

• Text should be word-processed and follow the APA style for layout.
• Use Arial font and double spacing.
• You must include a reference section at the end of the assessment. Referencing and citations should be in the APA format.

With this being the main piece of assessment, the marking criteria will cover all of the unit’s planned learning outcomes. The marking criteria will be in the form of a detailed marking rubric available on the Moodle site. The criteria laid out in the rubric will assess you on how well you are able to cover both mainstream and diverse perspectives in your essay, to reflexively describe how sociocultural and international contexts impact those perspectives, to evaluate the usefulness of particular social psychological ideas and to map out the way social power impacts social phenomena. There will not be a separate marking criterion related to your written expression (such as the clarity of your writing and your avoidance of spelling and grammatical errors), but implicit to each element of the marking criteria will be an assessment of your writing skills. I.e., if you present an idea poorly because of writing errors, you will not pick up as many marks as you would if you were to present that same idea well written.