Teach

Overview

Kristin Yarris and Mary Wood received a University of Oregon Mellon Art Museum-Library Collaboration Grant to teach two interconnected courses as we further developed our research project on the history of American psychiatry and nation-state formation. The courses were Wood’s Madness, Place, Story, taught within the English Department, and Yarris’s Global Mental Health, taught within International Studies. Both courses featured material on Morningside Psychiatric Hospital (a controversial private hospital operating in Portland, Oregon, from 1903-1963); Yarris’s course involved undergraduates in research on the history and politics of psychiatric treatment and diagnosis, while Wood’s course focused on the relationship between art (including visual art and creative writing) and mental health/distress. Several class activities during Fall of 2019, when the courses were taught, exposed students in both courses to archival materials in University of Oregon libraries and artistic materials in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA) related to mental illness and mental healthcare. Yarris spoke with Wood’s class about theories of diagnosis and treatment across cultures, and Wood spoke to Yarris’s class about memoir and the ways creative forms of writing and other artforms can generate knowledge. Both courses were experimental in the way they enacted collaboration across disciplines.  We encouraged students to join in these classes with a spirit of intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness and to see research and writing not as isolated academic pursuits but as exciting ways to follow one’s passion for a subject and share important discoveries with others. We underscored that research has the potential to fuel changes in mental health care policy and practice.