Subject: Mental Health and Illness

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).

Scavenger Hunt Activity | Teacher's Guide

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

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

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