Mental Narratives: Sad Feelings and Depression

• Health & Social Care
• Lower Secondary (Key Stage 3)
• Upper Secondary (Key Stage 4)
• Further Education (Key Stage 5)

Introduction

Using Vincent van Gogh’s work and life story, and a film by Mentale Thee, the students will explore the subject of ‘sad feelings and depression’. Propositions and assignments will be used to prompt discussion, to enable them to reflect and determine their own view.

Instructions

General goals

- To prompt discussion of ‘sad feelings and depression’.

- To get to know Vincent van Gogh.

Link with curriculum

- The subject of this lesson ties is suitable for tutor group sessions.

Differentiation

- This lesson can be combined with the lessons on stress, sad feelings and friendship, and asking for help.

- Feel free to give the lesson as you see fit, adapting it to suit the level and age of your students. Slides may be omitted or added.

Materials

• The students can use their mobile or another device to read the propositions and questions. The lesson can also be given without using mobiles.

• Pen and paper.

• Optional: paint, balloons, one canvas for each group, black marker pen.

• Optional: black marker pen, coloured markers, thick paper or canvas for each group.

• Optional: black marker pen, several colours of paint, brushes of different thicknesses (preferably thick) and a canvas or piece of thick paper for each group.

Mental narratives

How do you get students talking about subjects like stress, courage, asking for help and sad feelings? And how do you shape the discussion? We have developed four lessons based on the art and life of Vincent van Gogh to help you start a discussion on these subjects and explore them further. The videos feature Maren Porte and Sanne Haak from the Mentale Thee (‘Mental Tea’) podcast talking to their peers about these subjects. The lessons have been developed with academic experts, and people who have personal experience of these issues.

Mental Narratives: Sad Feelings and Depression

Vincent van Gogh

Question: What do you know about Vincent van Gogh?

Practical instructions: The students may answer using their mobile. If you prefer to give the lesson without using mobiles, the answers can be written on the smartboard (click on the pencil icon).

Vincent

Vincent van Gogh had a troubled life. Things weren’t always easy. His mental health difficulties sometimes made him frightened, sad and unsure of himself. He was quite fragile, but he was also strong. He always tried to find the courage to carry on. Painting helped him get himself together again, and nature gave him comfort. 

Introduce the subject of the lesson, incorporating the students’ answers (to the previous slide). See the hotspot for the context. 

Open

Vincent sent lots of letters to his family and friends. He wrote most of them (more than 600) to Theo, his younger brother and best friend. He wrote quite openly to him about the things that concerned him, like family, money, love and art. And also about his physical and mental health. Thanks to those letters, we know a lot about Vincent, and about the good and bad times in his life. 

I well knew that one could break one’s arms and legs before, and that then afterwards that could get better but I didn’t know that one could break one’s brain and that afterwards that got better too. 

Vincent wrote:

Taboo on mental health problems 

19th century

Mental health problems were taboo in Vincent’s day. There was no psychiatric care as we know it today. If you had mental health problems which made it difficult for you to fit in, there was a good chance you would end up in an ‘institution’. And once they went there, many people never left. 

Ear

In December 1888 Vincent and his friend, the artist Paul Gauguin, were living at the Yellow House in Arles (South of France). They were not a great combination, and there was a lot of tension between them. After one argument Vincent became so upset that he cut off his ear. Just before this, he had probably been working too hard and not taking good care of himself. 

Doctor

Dr Félix Rey treated Vincent’s wound at the hospital. He wrote: ‘When I tried to ask him about why he had cut his ear off, he told me it was a strictly personal matter.’ 

Institution

The crises kept coming, so Vincent voluntarily admitted himself to an institution in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He was treated by doctors, who tried to calm him. There were no psychiatrists yet in those days. Vincent received a number of treatments, including ‘hydrotherapy’, which involved switching between cold and hot baths. He would sometimes have to sit in them for hours.

Vincent van Gogh, Garden of the Asylum, 1889

Drawing and painting

Vincent stayed at the institution for nearly a year. When he was very ill he didn’t paint, but at other times he was very productive. He made about 150 paintings there, two of which you can see here. Vincent had an extra room which he used as a studio (see ‘Window in the Studio’). ‘Wheatfield with a Reaper’ is actually the view from his bedroom. After he left the institution, Vincent moved to Auvers, a village just north of Paris, to be near his brother Theo.

Painting emotion

Vincent didn’t just paint what he saw. He tried to put feeling into his work, through the way he used the brush, and by combining colours to create harmony or contrast. This gave his paintings an emotional layer. 

Lonely

Angry

Sad

Stable

Surprised

Panicky

Calm

Safe

Exhausted

Artist Vincent van Gogh
Title Garden of the Asylum
Date December 1889
Location Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France
Collection Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

What feeling goes with this painting, do you think?

Option: Choose this assignment or the one on the next slide. They are optional, but they are both appropriate at this point.

Have the students open the hotspots and choose one or more of the options.

You might like to ask them to explain their choices. There is no right or wrong response.

Discuss with the whole class.

What feeling do you get from this painting?

Vincent

Vincent wrote that the colour combination in this work 'gives rise a little to the feeling of anxiety from which some of my companions in misfortune often suffer, and which is called "seeing red"'.

Lonely

Happy

Sorrowful

Frightened

Excited

Jealous

Calm

Gloomy

Vulnerable

Artist Vincent van Gogh
Title Wheatfield under Thunderclouds
Date July 1890
Location Auvers-sur-Oise, France
Collection Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

What feeling goes with this painting, do you think?

Have the students open the hotspots and choose one or more of the options.

You might like to ask them to explain their choices. There is no right or wrong response.

Discuss with the whole class.

What feeling do you get from this painting?

Vincent wrote:

'They’re immense stretches of wheatfields under turbulent skies, and I made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness.'

Comfort then and now

Vincent already knew that he could find peace and comfort in nature, as well as in art. When he still lived in The Hague, in 1882, he wrote, ‘How much good it does a person if one is in a gloomy mood to walk on the empty beach and look into the grey-green sea with the long white lines of the waves.’

That feeling is timeless: art and nature still have a positive effect on our mental health.

What might help these kids if they’re feeling down?

Have the students answer individually or in pairs. 

What helps you when you’re down?

Practical instruction: check in pairs.

What can you do if that doesn’t work?

Practical instruction: think, share and exchange in groups of 2 or 4. 

Assignment: Your curve

Think back over the past year at school. Then complete the three steps below. 

Example

Draw a horizontal line and write all the months along it. 

1

For each month, note the best and the worst moments. Good things above and bad things below. Have you finished? What do you notice?

2

Choose this assignment or the one on the next slide. You may choose both if you wish.

Everyone should do this assignment individually. Students can exchange answers in pairs afterwards. Then discuss with the whole class (in outline).

3

Choose this assignment or the one on the next slide. You may choose both if you wish.

Everyone should do this assignment individually. Students can exchange answers in pairs afterwards. Then discuss with the whole class (in outline).

Assignment: Emotion on canvas

Write it and let go

Write your fears, irritations, anger and other negative feelings on the canvas.

1

Think in colour

Option A: Take balloons filled with paint and throw them one after the other against the canvas so that they break.

Option B/C: Take a brush or pen and paint or colour over all the words.

2

Each group will need a large canvas for this assignment. Ask the students to write their fears and negative thoughts on the canvas. Things like ‘feel inadequate’, ‘ugly’, ‘stress’, ‘gloom’ etc. When they are finished they can:

• option A: throw balloons filled with paint against the canvas until everything is covered.
• option B: paint over the words with a thick brush, until everything is covered.
• option C: colour over their words with coloured pens, until everything is covered.

Discuss the results: what do they think of it, and how did it feel?

Talk some more?

• Tutor/teacher
  
• Counsellor
  
• Pastoral care coordinator
  
• Someone you trust
  
• GP/school doctor
• Mind www.mind.org.uk / YoungMinds www.youngminds.org.uk