Dear Educator:
These lesson plans are designed to be used with college
undergraduates and advanced secondary school students. We hope that
the information, resources and questions offered here are useful in
generating classroom discussion and research projects on the issues
raised in the film Imagining Robert.
We offer three lesson plans:
Stigma and Chronic Mental
Illness
A Brief Overview of the Asylum
and Deinstitutionalization
A Classroom Discussion Guide
The film touches upon a great number of other issues.
We encourage students and teachers to explore these on their own, and
to share their experiences with us through feedback.
We also encourage teachers and students to use the book,
Imagining Robert. The book provides many more details about
Roberts family life, upbringing, hospitalizations and treatments.
Sincerely,
Ricki Kantrowitz
Alex Cohen
Ricki E. Kantrowitz, Ph.D. is Professor of
Psychology at Westfield State College, Westfield, Massacusetts and
is a psychotherapist in private practice. She teaches such courses
as Abnormal Psychology, Counseling Theory and Practice, Cross-Cultural
Psychology, Women and Mental Health, and Madness in Film and Literature.
She recently completed an Instructor's manual for Barbara Okun's Effective
helping: Interviewing and counseling techniques. For the past
seven years she has been an NGO representative of the World Federation
for Mental Health at the United Nations in New York.
Alex Cohen, Ph.D. is a medical anthropologist
with a specialty in psychiatry. He coordinates the World Mental Health
Project at the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School
where he also teaches. He teaches in a training program in mental
health policy development and services research, a joint initiative
between the University of Melbourne and Harvard Medical School and
funded through an unrestricted educational grant from the Eli Lilly
Company.