My course, Madness, Mental Illness, and Emotional Distress, is taught at Vanier College in St-Laurent, Québec, a CÉGEP (Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel). CÉGEPs are unique to Québec and offer a diploma that replaces the usual grade 12 and first-year university curriculum, as well as offering trade programs. This course is taught in a Humanities department, as a mandatory general education credit for students across many programs. Specifically, this is my version of a ‘Worldviews’ course, which has to provide students with skills and competencies around describing, examining, and relating different worldviews. Teachers have the leeway to choose any topic through which to establish these competencies.
I wanted to teach a worldviews course that laid the groundwork for students interested in philosophy of psychiatry and philosophy of psychotherapy, while also being useful to students that would take no further study on these topics. I was inspired by Foucauldian genealogical approaches to madness and sanity, by my past study of Freud and classical psychoanalysis on hysteria, and by finding the accessible reading “Breakdown Palace” by Alex Mar, on R.D. Laing. I organized the course into 3 rough units: (Classical) psychoanalysis, Anti-psychiatry, and Mental Wellness in the 21st century. In each unit, we examine the social context that influences ideas around what the problem or cause of madness is, as well as how to treat it, and constitutive parts of the society that are embedded in the worldview. This helps students to see that the ways in which we treat ‘mental health’ today are not fixed nor necessary, and to unpack shared assumptions about behaviour and emotion. The course links our understandings of madness to shared societal views on gender, counterculture and rebellion, and individualist neoliberalism. Students regularly tell me that this is one of their favourite courses taken at Vanier College, and they are excited to learn about a topic that relates deeply to their everyday lives and struggles.
Pedagogically, I assign a balance of primary sources and secondary sources, as well as a balance of formal academic readings and informal blog posts. There is a fair amount of reading to be done, but I do not focus upon memorization or mastery of each text individually; rather, the aim is for students to glean the main points of the frameworks at hand and be able to analyze, critique, and compare them. The course has taken many different forms over 4 years; for example, I originally included some readings from Foucault on madness, but I found that the students understood genealogy as a method more than Foucault’s writing on madness itself. Initially, I also organized the assessments around weekly written reflections. Students were resistant to completing many short written assignments, and so I pivoted to having two unit tests and a final essay. In the final essay, students have to compare two out of the three worldviews and argue for which is preferable (with much nuance allowed). I am considering adding a third unit test, on Mental Wellness, and having a take-home final essay topic that directly compares the journeys of Dora and Mary Barnes.
In class, I do some lecturing, show many short videos and clips from YouTube, and the students regularly have small group discussions as well as brainstorming sessions. I ask them to write very short reflections to individualized questions on index cards, and students appreciate the time and space (and often write more in depth than I expect!). We engage in discussion about what kinds of therapeutic or non-therapeutic treatments are best, through activities including trying out an ‘Automatic Thought Record’ worksheet.
I include a mandatory viewing of the film A Dangerous Method (2011) as homework, and we work through some examples from the film in class, examining how it demonstrates the social context of gender in Vienna in the early 1900s, as well as its examples of free association and dream analysis. Students can also take on an optional viewing of the film Mad to be Normal (2017), a portrayal of Kingsley Hall and antipsychiatric methods. Linking the films to the material in class strongly impacts student learning, by seeing theory made incarnate through real examples.
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Emily R. Douglas
Emily R. Douglas is Instructor of Humanities at CÉGEP Vanier College. They have taught at McGill University, St. Mary’s University, Mount Allison University, and Athabasca University. Their research focuses on the intersections of feminist philosophy of disability, critical phenomenology, and critical race feminisms. See their website, emilyrdouglas.com, for more.
