What: We decided that we will be creating flyers to inform college students about mental illness. The flyer will include information on mental illness such as Depression, Anxiety, thoughts of suicide or even if there is a stressful event in their lives. There will be symptoms and signs that students should look out for to help them identify if they feel any of these symptoms and whether they should seek the help that they would need. The fliers will also provide access to a suicide hotline number as well as the Baruch psychologist center. We will be handing these flyers out to students around campus as well as putting them up around where students will see them.
Why: The main character from our book, The Bluest Eye, eventually projected that she had developed a mental illness at the end of the book. Pecola has obviously been through very traumatic events throughout her young life. During this time, she had no help in coping with these issues. We want to help those who feel like they have no one to turn to. We want to provide access to those that need to express their feelings. College students like ourselves struggle with school work and are sometimes juggling work and school. This can really take a toll on them which causes extreme stress and can lead to depression. We want to help our peers overcome these problems by enabling them to seek the help that they need. We want to be a part of helping those who are suicidal and, we hope that this effort of ours will help someone in this condition. We urge those who feel stressed to speak their mind and let off some steam. Unfortunately, Pecola did not have anyone to guide her and give her support but we do and we want to make sure that this opportunity is presented.
I really like that you are taking note of psychic health/mental illness in The Bluest Eye, and I love the inclination towards out reach and service education in this project proposal.
I do have some concerns though:
– I’m wondering how you envision your project incorporating the novel and other aspects of the course work/assignments. Specifically how do you imagine your project satisfying #6 on the list of things I’m looking for (i.e. project requirements)? (See assignment page for details.)
-Relatedly how does your project as you currently envision it differ from the flyers and education materials already available via the counseling center or student life?
-I want to caution you first to not recreate the wheel and second to not try to recreate the wheel when you are not actually trained as a hewer, blacksmith or stone-cutter let alone as a wheel maker! You might have particular interest and knowledge in this area that I’m not aware of which is great, but at the end of the day you’d be making these panels through the medium of a literature class which is not a verifying source for mental health issues.
-My comments don’t necessarily mean abandon the idea entirely. What it means is that you 1) might to do some more research about what materials and things are already being done to promote this information and by whom or what channels? And 2) what you need to ask is How might The Bluest Eye and our sustained engagement with this novel speak to/ deepen/ challenge/ support/etc. the conversation and ideas about mental health already at work on campus?
-What I don’t want in any occasion is for you to completely abandon the literature or to only use it as a general jump off point to something that does not really relate to the book.
It’s fine to not squarely root the project in the book or the promotion of the book, but you should engage the book in your project, and that engagement should be relevant to specifics of what book is doing
-One of the things to think about is why are you focusing on a college demographic when none of the characters in the book go to college that we know of and their mental health issues (while not separate from the ones people experience in college) are not the particular issues of being a college student. Indeed there’s not tons of school scenes in the novel, but there is the primer allusion at the opening and there are the scenes on the playground with the boys and Pecola, and there’s mention of school. So perhaps you want to focus on what the novel is saying in these moments about how school and education affect psychic and mental health?
Two things you definitely to keep in mind as you think about the answer to that question is that 1) the novel is very explicitly engaging early primary education. The school references we receive are all around elementary school. and 2) the novel is very explicitly interested interested in black communities, black mental health, and the way antiblack sentiments and practices affect mental health of black children. Certainly the novel is interested in the ways in which the ways in which antiblackness is influenced and intensified by issues of gender, kinship, and poverty, but you can’t talk about mental health in relation to The Bluest Eye and not talk about race and antiblack racism.
Until you get a sense of what’s already out there and more specific articulation about why you see the novel as significant in the conversation about mental health, I can’t give you lots of specific suggestions. Still some a couple things I imagine might be possible/fitting:
-Working with the counseling center and their materials to think about ways to increase a discussion around race and mental health. Such a thing could go many ways: Perhaps you go to the counseling center and see that their pamphlets feature images mostly of white students. You might design a teach in with The Bluest Eye as a central (but not the only) text for examination about the needs to think about race in mental health and to have materials that visually reflect that commitment. (i.e. Perhaps one of the point is that pamphlets with only white images are like the Mary Jane candy with a picture of a white girl, they communicate a message that mental health care is a white thing, that it is for white people, and that non white people who use it are actively trying to become white or reject their racial/ethnic identity). Or perhaps you take a less cooperative and direct approach by designing posters that integrate the pamphlets images with the text from the novel and other facts and statistics in a way that visually articulates the critique and education the teach-in would have made.
Or perhaps what you want to focus on is the way in which The Bluest Eye signals to mental health issues that might keep black and brown girls from entering high school let alone college. So perhaps you change your audience to include a group of secondary educators, or an after school group of black and brown girls to whom you have some personal relation and thus access. Or perhaps you make flyers that connect the mental health issues and the traumas that produce it to current statistics about abuse and mental health for black and brown girls in NYC? And maybe you include at the bottom or all around the periphery information about places to read more or find support. You would not be teaching about mental illness. You would be trying to call awareness to a still relevant problem, by asking us to consider the charged poetics and unnerving imagery of the iconic novel alongside the facts and testimonies of folks in our current everyday life. These posters you could put up in various communities. Etc.