Abstract
The authors describe a course in psychiatric nursing where media in the form of literature, film, and music were used as teaching strategies. The purpose was to enhance students' sensitivity to the personal experiences of psychiatric patients while also broadening students' understanding of mental illness and the institutions developed to treat it. Students' critical reading, thinking, and analytic skills were cultivated, along with introspection and self-reflection.
Much has been said in the last few decades about the negative impact that television, movies, and other entertainment media have on academic learning. Yet, like it or not, many of today's college students, given the choice of reading Melville or watching an Al Pacino movie, would unhesitatingly choose the latter. However, rather than viewing popular entertainment as a distraction to learning, we found a way to use it as a learning catalyst.
Recurring themes throughout our undergraduate psychiatric nursing class included questions about disease definitions, psychosocial aspects of care, and how and where to best care for patients with mental illness. To facilitate an increased understanding of these issues, in the fall of 2000 the faculty devised learning activities to engage students' critical thinking skills through the use of literature, film, and music. These strategies assisted students to enhance their sensitivity to the personal experiences of psychiatric patients while broadening students' understanding of mental illness and the institutions developed to treat it. It must be emphasized here that reading clinical texts and other traditional approaches to teaching continued to be stressed. To help students understand the biological, psychological, and social origins of mental illness, lectures and clinical experiences focused on the practice of psychiatric nursing in acute, chronic, and community settings.
While lecture and clinical experiences are undoubtedly important, the psychosocial nursing faculty also believe that literature and other media have a great influence on society's perception of mental illness and the cultural construction of disease. The idea of using literature, film, and music as teaching tools in nursing education was discussed by Mohr in 1995. 1 Building on Carper's 2 and Chinn's 3,4 classical analyses of patterns of knowing that included aesthetics, or the "art" of nursing, Mohr argued, "The understanding of certain truths of human experience such as the nature of the self, anguish, guilt, choice, madness are central to the discipline of nursing."1(p376) If these concepts are to be best understood, students must learn them with methods that involve more than "detached observation" or "dispassionate description."1
Along these lines, we incorporated pedagogical tools from the humanities that included reading selected literature, observing assigned films, and listening to particular music pieces (see Table 1). Each depicted trends, issues, ethical dilemmas, and other problems that inform the practice of psychiatric nursing today.