Category: Social-Community Supports

Component Evaluation: Getting to Activism

Component Evaluation: Getting to Activism Timing: 30 Minutes Mode: In-class Pat Capponi and veteran Vancouver activist and writer Lanny Beckman have never met each other, but wouldn’t they have an interesting conversation if they did?  Imagine the two talking about the life moments and influences that helped push them from personal dislocation to empathy and …

Components: Self-Guided

Components: From Stigma to Action – Self-Guided Learning Timing: 30 Minutes Mode: In-Class; Online Living on the frontlines of community mental health during her stay at the Parkdale boarding house, Pat Capponi found an identity and a purpose there, creating coherence out of the chaos of early deinstitutionalization. What makes her story such an excellent …

Component Evaluation: Think Piece

Component Evaluation: Think Piece in Governmentality Timing: 45 Minutes; Flexible  Mode: In-class; Online Professor Kathy Kendall, the sociologist who discovered the 1940s radio plays, describes them as an example of governmentality, the creation of the ideal Canadian citizen through the guidance of mental health experts and the use of public education. Listen to Kendall make …

Component Evaluation: Creating a Play

Component Evaluation: Creating a Radio Play Timing: 30 Minutes Mode: In-class These radio plays help us to understand the socio-political-historical context in which madness is defined and managed.  The act of writing a script for a current radio play prescribing “appropriate” behaviour allows students to explore how socio-political influences impact what we see as pathological …

Components: Self-Guided

Components: Radio Plays – Self Guided Learning Timing: 60 minutes Mode: In-class; Online Instructors can assign either Radio Play 1 and its accompanying commentary or Radio Play 2 and its accompanying commentary for students to listen to online or in class.  Students should listen to their assigned play and take note of words and ideas …

Us and Them

Us and Them Unit Takeaways Recognize the profound dislocation of self and identity in mental health crises Appreciate the importance (and challenges) of empathic and critically-informed practice in bridging the distance between mental health practitioner and service user Component The component for this unit is a reflection on the distance between the patient and the …

What If?

What If? Unit Takeaways Recognize stigmatizing attitudes toward mental health and mental health patients, as compared to other medicalized conditions and patients categories Component The component for this unit is “What If? …Cancer Prisons,” a short satirical essay that contrasts attitudes toward cancer patients and mental health patients. Written by a Mad School community expert …

From Stigma to Action

    From Stigma to Action Unit Takeaways Understand the importance of adequate personal and systemic support in ameliorating discrimination and marginalization in mental health Appreciate the role of empathic knowledge informed by lived experience in fostering successful advocacy and activism Components The components for this unit are frontline stories of marginalization, discrimination, and nascent …

1940s Mental Health Radio Plays

  1940s Mental Health Radio Plays Unit Takeaways Relate social norms and notions of normal to the construction of good mental health, as viewed by mental health experts, the media and the wider society Appreciate the power of authoritative knowledge brokers, i.e. mental health practitioners, the media, and public mental health educators in constructing notions …

Component Evaluation: Asking for Funding

Component Evaluation: Asking for Funding Time: 30 minutes Mode: In class; Online In September 2015, the Gallery Gachet Collective learned that their primary source of operational funding, the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority (the regional health), were cutting all financial assistance to the organization.  After students have viewed the Gachet video, share news of this decision …