culturally appropriate men's personal development programme

“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”

Langston Hughes

poet, social activist, novelist

the men's PDP course

The course

All Oxytocin-Learning courses combines interactive learning sessions, webinars, presentations and self reading. The Oxytocin men’s PDP is a 12-week programme with 16 lessons with each lesson lasting two hours.

The men’s PDP has been specifically designed as a blended course with lessons elements consisting of online learning lessons via zoom in addition to having supported group and individuals activities to complete which are all facilitated via online webinars once per week fro the duration of the course. Individuals can also receive additional one-2-one support sessions if desired.

The culturally reflective approach and design of the course is to infuse and incorperate evidenced based African centred therapeutic treatment models from the US in addition to the lived experience of African and Caribbean men.

The course will equips learners with a contextual understanding of racialised mental health or drug using experiences within wider society and enables individuals to develop an awareness and resilience in managing wider challenges associated with mental health and substance use disorders.

Research, conducted by the ‘NHSE Mental Health Secure Transformation Team’, identiﬁed that Black men were not as engaged, as their peers in the learning programmes offered by the services they experienced.

Lessons and topics

All lessons and topics have been designed to ensure participants can make a positive contribution through sharing their persona experience of mental health, substance misuse, racism, relationships and cultural experiences.

Learning assignments and activities and have also been designed so participants can develop a clear understanding of the self-empowering impact of cultural awareness and the positive change they have already made in their lives.

Participants

Participants will acquire an in-depth understanding of African Caribean culture; African psychology; mental health within the African Caribbean community and cultural drug use around the world.

Further learning will build resilience and competencies in future planning. Importantly participants will gain an insight into the main challenges experienced by Black men. Participants will explore a range of ways to address these challenges. Through this process they will also make sense of how their personal experiences relate to other racialised groups.

The skills and knowledge participants will acquire will enable them to appropriately assert themselves, and use their voice, in a range of situations.