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 Robert’s family life, upbringing, hospitalizations and treatments.

Sincerely,

Ricki Kantrowitz
Alex Cohen

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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.