Feel free to explore these additional resources on your own to supplement your knowledge for these lessons or share and discuss these sources with your classrooms.

• Ten Days in a Mad-House (Project Gutenberg)
  In 1887, 23-year-old reporter Nellie Bly had herself committed to a New York City asylum for 10 days to expose the horrific conditions for 19th-century mental patients. Read her piece of investigational journalism here.
  
  learn more
  
  
• A History of Mental Illness (PBS)
  Mental illness affects every one of us in some way. We have come a long way in our understanding of mental health, but there’s still so much we don’t know. Take a look at the history of mental health treatment in the United States and the stigma that is still sometimes connected to mental illness today.
  
  watch video
  
  
• A New Way to Help Young People (TED)
  Tom Osborn wants more young people to have access to the mental health support they need. He and his team are training 18- to 22-year-olds to deliver evidence-based mental health care to their peers in Kenya — which has only two psychiatrists for every million people. Hear how his community-first, youth-oriented model could become a template to help kids across the world lead successful, independent lives.
  
  watch video

Click here to download a PDF of this exercise

Subject(s): Social Studies, English and Theatre

Goals: Students will be able to:

• Develop ideas individually and collaboratively.
• Propose and select alternatives to solve problems while building an ensemble.
• Use verbal and nonverbal techniques for presentation.
• Produce, analyze, and evaluate auditory, visual, and written media messages.

Show Connection:

• Characters in The Voices on Blackwell Island struggle with their wellness; physical, mental or otherwise. The physical restrictions and abusive environment at Blackwell’s Island greatly reduce the agency of the women living there. In this exercise, students will gain a better understanding of their relationship with mental health work as they unpack their sense of self and relationship to society.

Materials:

• Large Pieces of Paper
• Arts and Craft Supplies

Set Up:

• Divide the students into two-person partnerships. Give each partnership two large pieces of paper and a marker.

Description:

• Invite the students to reflect on where anxiety, fear, nerves, trauma, stress, neurosis live on their body. Where do the memories of the past live within them? Where in their body do they feel negative feelings? Is it a lump in their throat, a grab in their chest, welling up in their eyes, etc?
• After a moment of reflection, partners take turns tracing their partner’s body, making sure to trace the region of the body their partner says they hold onto those feelings. If it’s their whole body, that’s fine. If it’s just one or two body parts that is also fine as well. Once the tracing is done, invite each person to take the traced sheet of paper of themselves to do more work on.
• Assuming they have some negative space surrounding the actual tracing, invite them to divide the negative space into three areas. The student will be asked three questions. Each question should be answered visually (no words allowed!) within one of the subdivided areas (one area for each question), using the provided arts and craft supplies.
  • How does society serve you? How does society help you?
  • How does society harm you?
  • What is something in the potential for society (or the potential for how society could serve you) that excites you?
• Then, within the tracing of their body, students subdivide that area into three sections. Students then visually represent and respond to the following questions with provided arts and crafts supplies. (No words allowed). As before, one question and answer for each subdivision:
  • What is something you like about yourself?
  • What is something that you dislike about yourself or something that you struggle with?
  • How do you seek help and relief for the thing you struggle with?
• Between the two rounds of visual questioning and subdividing, you’re looking at about 20 minutes of art response time. Encourage vocal discussion amongst the students as they find the answers to the questions.
• As a class, lay out or post the students’ pieces around the classroom, creating a “Museum of Mental Health.” Have the students wander around their classmates’ work, observing it and responding to some of the following questions as they browse the work.
  • If you had to make a noise to represent how this whole class felt about themselves, what would it sound like?
  • If you had to make a face to represent how this class felt about how society treats them, what would it look like?
  • What is a message of support you would say to another member of this class, after looking at and interpreting their piece?
  • What is one word you would use to describe how this class feels about themselves and what they are capable of?
• Be sure to hear and see some of their responses to the work.

Discussion:

• What is a challenge that you feel is uniquely put upon your gender and or generation when it comes to your mental well being? (Maybe it is an expectation, a preconceived notion, etc.)
• What sort of solutions might there be, short term or long term, in bridging the divides between society, ourselves, and the expectations and realities we hold up towards one another?

Click here to download a PDF of this exercise

Subject(s): Social Studies and Theatre

Goals: Students will be able to:

• Employ voice, body, and imagination in role playing.
• Incorporate psychological, historical, and social dynamics derived from information suggested by the script.
• Synthesize evidence from artifacts and primary and secondary sources to obtain information about events in United States history.
• Compare and contrast the use of rhyme, rhythm, sound, imagery, and other literary devices to convey a message and elicit the reader’s emotion.

Show Connection:

• Inspired by the writings of Nellie Bly, the ten days spent in the madhouse by characters in The Voices on Blackwell Island starts with some ambitious goals and some even bigger long term changes to the world of mental health. To better understand why such change was necessary we must dive into what the patients experienced on a day to day basis on the island itself.

Materials:

• Ten Days in a Mad-House Sound Paragraphs
• Noisemakers and Found Objects from Classroom

Description:

• As you will see in The Voices on Blackwell Island, the playwright takes several historical female figures and combines their stories into one tale of historical fiction, creating a theatrical collage of lives impacted by undeserved hardship and condemnation.
  • In Nellie Bly’s case, her feigned insane journey into Blackwell’s Asylum and the subsequent publishing of her series of articles in the New York World on the experience as Ten Days in a Mad-House prompted a grand jury to launch its own investigation. The jury’s report resulted in an $850,000 increase in the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections. The grand jury also ensured that future examinations were more thorough such that only the seriously ill were committed to the asylum. The atrocities and horrible conditions and abuses on display that were reported led to sweeping change at this institution.
  • This exercise will give students the opportunity to interpret and create the environments women in these asylums endured through sound.
  • Put students into small groups, giving each group a distinct area to work (preferably as far away from other groups as possible.) Provide each group with a selection of noisemakers and any objects that could be used to make interesting noises. Give each group one of the four sound paragraph excerpts from Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House
• Each group of students now has 15 minutes to create an environmental soundscape with a clear beginning, middle and end and present it to us in the dark as the story is read aloud. Students should feel free to use themselves as instruments, found objects from the room, as well as any items provided to them by the instructor. The piece itself should be at least two minutes long and must feature participation by every member of the group. Groups should keep in mind the power of stopping the audible reading of the story excerpt to engage with other sounds and how students can still tell a story with sound, and not need written narrative to keep it going. Please encourage the groups to take this subject matter seriously. This is not an opportunity to belittle or punch down at these very real things that happened to the women of Blackwell Island.
• Have the groups present one at a time, turning the lights off in your classroom. Encourage the seated audience to close their eyes to remove additional stimuli and to focus just on the story that is being conjured through the words and sounds they hear. As an added challenge to groups, have them present their piece without reading the excerpt and then have them present their piece with the excerpt being read alongside it.

Discussion:

• Did you feel particular soundscapes were grounded in reality or more fanciful than others? What about certain ones made them feel more “real”?
• What were the most frightening or upsetting moments you heard? How would you feel if you were living in an environment filled with these kinds of sounds? How would that affect you?
• How important is verbal communication to you when it comes to understanding a situation or how someone is feeling? Is it necessary? How do you find you communicate with the world around you the best? (Verbally, Physically, Artistically, Written Word?)

Click here to download a PDF of this exercise

Subject(s): Social Studies, Theatre and English

Goals: Students will be able to:

• Synthesize evidence from artifacts and primary and secondary sources to obtain information about events in United States history;
• Create and maintain character traits with body and voice.
• Compare and contrast the use of rhyme, rhythm, sound, imagery, and other literary devices to convey a message and elicit the reader’s emotion.
• Describe how theatrical works can entertain, inform, and interpret the human experience.

Show Connection:

• The Voices on Blackwell Island is a contemporary adaptation of Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House, filled with references to the original text. While you don’t need to be familiar with Ten Days in a Mad-House to appreciate the play, the play is filled with references to it and the more you know what it’s based on, the more of those references you’ll catch and the more you’ll appreciate the adaptation.

Materials:

• Ten Days in a Madhouse Edited Excerpts
• Ten Days Criteria Sheet

Set-Up:

• Divide the class into three groups and place them in distinct areas of the classroom.

Description:

• Ten Days in a Mad-House by American journalist Nellie Bly was based on articles written while Bly was on an undercover assignment for the New York World, feigning insanity at a women’s boarding house, to be committed to an insane asylum. She then investigated the reports of brutality and neglect at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now called Roosevelt Island) in New York City. Through a combination of her in depth and personal flair in reporting and the release of Ten Days in a Mad-House, she ultimately brought a grand jury investigation to the Island as well as a financial increase in the Department of Public Charities and Corrections to New York City.
• Each group of students must theatrically stage their assigned chapters of Ten Days in a Madhouse. (Group 1 – Chapters 1 – 6, Group 2 – Chapters 7 – 12, Group 3 – Chapters 13 – 17.) Groups must create a 30-45 second long minute piece of theater for each chapter assigned. Groups present their pieces in order, each beginning with a declaration of the chapter’s title, so audience members understand what they are about to witness. The transitions between chapter sections should be crisp, clear and theatrical. Everyone in each group must be present “on stage” at least once in each chapter assigned to them. (Do your best as a group, in planning, to avoid not knowing what you need to do next. Write out your duties, what you are supposed to do and when you are supposed to do it. This should be one seamless piece of chapters interwoven together.)
• Some suggestions:
  • Read through your group’s assigned chapters. You may divide and conquer if you want but make sure the group knows the meaning, event and intent of the text and is prepared to create a world with this text. We suggest you read it aloud as a group for the first time through. Highlighting and underlining parts the group finds compelling, exciting, fun or terrifying to put on the stage theatrically. (What do you see, smell, taste, hear, feel? How can you reproduce those sensations through your bodies as performers and physical / audible things you create with your group?)
  • Let these pieces be theatrical. Let there be a clear beginning, middle and end to each chapter. It’s fine to entertain your audience but try and teach us and most importantly elicit feelings from the audience. Identify with your group where the performance area for the piece is. (The front of the room, the entire room, etc.)
• Some requirements for each group:
  • One chapter, aside from the title introduction, must be entirely silent. Only physical movements and interactions between performers around the space to tell the story of this chapter.
  • One chapter must feature self produced or generated music, sounds, percussion, etc. No pre-recorded music here. The audio must be generated by your bodies or other objects sourced from the room.
• Pass out the criteria sheets to each group as well as their assigned Ten Days in a Madhouse Edited Excerpts. Groups are given sufficient time to prepare their piece before presenting them in order, group by group.

Discussion:

• What chapters and sections of the story were the most compelling? Why? How did groups stage and bring the words to life in compelling and unique ways?
• The Voices on Blackwell Island is a work of historical fiction. If you could add or find out more information about a particular aspect of the Island and Nellie’s time there, what would you want to learn more about? What unheard voices and parts of the story deserve to be heard in your opinion?