Subject: Mental Health and Illness
Five Minute History Lessons
David Boder
Psychologist David P. Boder is primarily known for making the first voice recordings of Holocaust survivors. His research centered around trauma and using a wire recorder he recorded the stories of displaced persons in Europe following WWII (1946) and later in the United States after the Kansas City Flood (1951).
Lectures and Panels
Psychology Film Club: Mad to Be Normal
Discussion of the 2017 film Mad to Be Normal, exploring the life of R. D. Laing and the Kingsley Hall experiment.
Featuring: 62 minutes
Originally recorded: April 22, 2021
Psychology Film Club: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Discussion of the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and its depiction of institutional mental health treatment, psychosurgery, and mental illness.
Featuring: 60 minutes
Originally recorded: September 24, 2020
Archival Films & Recordings
The Nation's Mental Health
This excerpt from the March of Time series discusses the state of mental health care in the years following World War II and highlights the National Institute of Mental Health, which had been founded in 1946. It also provides a look at training for psychiatrists in the 1950s.
Length: 9 minutes
Originally recorded: 1951
Cummings Center Blog
Asylums and Epidemic Diseases
The Cummings Center's Cushing Memorial Library Collection of Asylum Reports is digitized and available as full-text, word-searchable PDFs. This blog provides primary source projects for students relating to the appearance of epidemic diseases in the asylum reports.
Contributed by: Lizette Royer Barton