Following on from our work that featured in TH 173 about teaching a history of people with disabilities, we have focused our recent development work on resources for teaching about mental health in the past. Here are the resources that we presented in our session at the HA conference in Chester in May 2019. This work is ongoing and we are also working with colleagues in the Netherlands. It would be great if other people would like to get involved.
Resources are provided here for a single lesson with the EQ: How differently have people viewed mental health?
We have a moral duty to reflect the diverse past in our classrooms and the Equality Duty Act of 2010 requires us to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimization, advance equality of opportunity between different groups and foster good relations between different groups. Respecting the past of everyone is part of fostering this.
From this lesson we want students to learn that:
• Mental health has a past and therefore a history
• Ideas of what constitutes mental illness and health have changed over time
• Ideas of what causes and the treatments for mental illness have changed over time due to these changing ideas, but also other cultural and societal changes.
It could be taught at the start of GCSE or as a KS3 study to encourage conceptual understanding of change over time (thematic).
The resources you need are here:
- Teacher notes – blog version
- Starter images (see below)
- Timeline of ideas and treatment
- Living graphs
- MH History lesson
There are also a selection of slot-ins on the YorkClio slot-in page.
The starter images are here:
yorkclio 