As students place headphones over their ears, they begin to hear voices. Some students hear happy phrases, telling them they are wonderful—that they are saviors. Others hear maniacal voices cursing and criticizing them. These voices continue for two hours as students shuffle around a room filled with mundane activities for them to complete. They must color in drawings with specific colors, and arrange toothpicks in formations.
But after two emotionally draining hours, these simple tasks begin to take longer—the students struggle to complete the activities, as they become more and more challenging hour after hour.
This activity entitled “Hearing Voices” is conducted as part of Professor of Biology Jim Donady’s spring course, “Integration of Clinical Experience and Life Science Learning (Biology 223)” This service-learning class takes students to the psychiatric facility at Connecticut Valley Hospital (CVH), where they interact with patients once a week. At the conclusion of this experiment, the “staff” running the activity debrief the participants on what they have heard—the activity simulates what many people with schizophrenia hear in their heads. The catch? The people administering the simulations are actually suffering from schizophrenia themselves.
This is one of many informative exercises for the students of Donady’s service-learning course, which is designed mostly for students hoping to go into fields related to medicine or psychology. Donady creates teams of four students—a Biology major, a Neuroscience major, a Psychology major and a Chemistry or MB&B major—and each team studies one mental illness. The team works together to analyze the illness, and then each individually presents scientific papers to the class. Students in the class agree that the volunteer work at CVH has changed their perceptions of mentally- ill patients.
“You don’t interact with mental illnesses on a day-to-day basis,” said Meaghan Dendy ’10, who took the course last spring. “That aspect of the world is hidden. This allowed me to have an understanding that they’re people too and that they can interact with us in a healthy manner.”
As part of their volunteer work, students help patients with recreational activities like gym, gardening, art and dance. Because many volunteers work with in high-security areas with patients who have been accused of serious crimes, they are required to pass through metal detectors and two sets of sealed doors in order to reach these patients.
“It’s initially scary, but after our orientation, where you learn the processes for entering the building, it’s not nearly as overwhelming and it’s a very safe and controlled environment,” Dendy said.
Donady first began working with CVH in 1997 through a summer volunteer program offered to underrepresented minority students. He began to notice links between academic courses and the volunteer work students were doing at the hospital.
“Students found a connection between the real life things they were doing in the morning and the academically relevant things they were doing for science courses,” Donady said. “It made the academics come alive.”
After realizing the potential connections between science courses and volunteer work at CVH, Donady developed Biology 223. However he was not fully satisfied with the service learning aspect of the course.
“I wanted to create a real service learning course where the project the students are doing at CVH is directly related to the academic material,” Donady said.
He began talking to the medical director at CVH, Dr. Stuart Forman ’74, about creating a new class. He discovered that CVH had begun to implement the Dr. Robert Liberman recovery method for psychiatric patients and built the course around this method.
The Liberman method puts the patients at the center of their recovery, based on the belief that recovery stems from patients, who identify their interests and goals and then work towards accomplishing those goals. A major component of the Liberman method is the questionnaire, the Client’s Assessment of Strengths, Interests and Goals (CASIG). Ideally, untrained family members and friends of patients can administer this CASIG, as it is a relatively simple questionnaire to administer.
“I fell into a wonderful opportunity,” Donady said. “You don’t have to be an expert in the area because the project and the academic material that we’re dealing with is, in a sense, intended for the general public.”
For interested sophomores, Donady also runs “Service-learning Clinical Experience at CT Valley Hospital” (Biology 131), a new course he developed this fall. Biology 131 contains three sections: first, students learn about CVH and it’s history and inner working, second, they learn about the Liberman method, and third, how to administer the CASIG. Finally, at the end of the semester the students administer the CASIG to CVH patients. Donady hopes they will continue volunteering at CVH throughout their last two years, which is why the course is restricted to sophomores.
“The patient is gaining something from the same student coming week after week and year after year, and the students gain a longitudinal clinical experience that is essentially nonexistent elsewhere,” Donady said.
After a few weeks of orientation and background on CVH, students begin meeting with patients and learning how to talk with them.
“Initially I was scared, because I didn’t know what to expect” said Tasmiha Khan ’12. “But they’re pretty normal and though some do have greater manifestations of their conditions, there are others that you wouldn’t even be able to tell have a mental illness.”
As students meet with the patients one-on-one, they begin to see past their mental illnesses.
“We had to first overcome stereotypes and learn to look at patients fresh every time,” said Ami Parekh ’12. “We learned not to classify and judge them based on their mental illnesses.”
Students are required to hear lectures from Donady and CVH staff members about the program. Though the Wesleyan students are volunteers, the patients are paid minimum wage by CVH to participate. Students keep journals of their experiences and compile these journals into a final paper at the end of the semester. They administer the CASIG during the final two weeks of the class, after they have learned how to properly administer the questionnaire and talk about the patients’ replies, as sometimes patients will give implausible responses, regarding their strengths, weaknesses, and identity.
“You don’t want to be too pessimistic with them, but sometimes their goals can be too farfetched, and then you have to be very tactful in handling it,” Khan said.
Donady plans to continue teaching Biology 223 and 131, even after he retires. He also envisions Psychology professors co-teaching Biology 131 in the future, since these classes have a large Psychology component to them. He predicts that after a few semesters, there will be a constant flow of student-volunteers at CVH.
“I see the possibility of hundreds of students volunteering there at any given moment, each interacting with different patients and different staff and having a great impact over a long period of time,” Donady said.
The classes have had a profound effect on the students involved, as they learn about themselves through the volunteer process.
“You begin to see the psychiatric patients, yourself and the world in a new way” Parekh said. “You notice new things about yourself and you become more self-aware of your behavior—it really is a self-learning class.”