Quick Summary
Minitex staff and librarians who work with eLibrary Minnesota, Ebooks Minnesota, Minnesota Digital Library, and Resource Sharing create monthly Resource Packs for Minnesota schools to highlight content that can be used in the classroom. This month's pack features fiction, nonfiction, and primary sources about Mental Health.
Minnesota's first mental health care facility was established in St. Peter in 1866 by the state legislature.
Image courtesy of the St. Peter Regional Treatment Center via the Minnesota Digital Library: https://collection.mndigital.org/catalog/rtc:1028
With the start of a new school year comes a new year of Resource Packs for Minnesota educators. Our team of librarians have carefully curated selections of learning resources related to specific topics of interest from eLibrary Minnesota, Ebooks Minnesota, and the Minnesota Digital Library. These primary sources, secondary sources, ebooks, and research databases are grouped by grade level and can be used in a variety of classrooms. Take a look at the first resource pack for the 2024-2025 school year: Mental Health.
Discussing mental health with young learners is an important but complex challenge. Use EBSCO's Explora Primary entry on Feelings and Emotions to find age appropriate, informative readings on the topic. Topics are broken out into easy-to-browse boxes that allow students to explore mental health, mindfulness, fears and phobias, stress, and more in a space that has been reviewed for K-5 appropriateness and reading levels.
Ebooks Minnesota is an excellent resource for finding books that discuss topics related to mental health in relatable ways, with beautiful pictures and read-aloud functions to draw students in. Students can read titles such as ‘My Life Beyond Depression’ to learn about what it’s like to live with the ups and downs of mental health from a young Mayo patient, or ‘The Spaces in Between’ for a picture book about working through anxiety and stress in daily life. These titles and many more are available for your younger students to enjoy, while older students can dig deeper into the processes behind mental health. Explore the Essential Health series to find several titles that provide overviews of the causes, risk factors, symptoms, and treatments of depression, addiction, anxiety, and more.
Middle and High School students can also find authoritative information and research on mental health topics in Britannica, Gale in Context, and EBSCO's Explora. Britannica contains an overview of the history of the field of mental health studies and therapy that can serve as an excellent entry into the topic. Explora Middle and High interfaces offer a pleasant browsing experience under their ‘Emotional And Mental Health’ topic views to allow students to click into the subtopic that they choose. Finally, Gale in Context Middle and High offer a ‘Mental Health’ slice into their database content that serves up reliable resources in a variety of modalities: readings, images, audio, and video.
The primary sources from the Minnesota Digital Library featured in this month’s pack illustrate the history of mental health treatment in Minnesota, starting with the establishment of the first state hospital for mental illness in 1866. Photographs and documents from early facilities and other treatment organizations are included to provide context to today’s conversations about mental health. Please note: Some historical materials about mental health may contain terms that are not considered appropriate today, so please address this in advance with students.
These items and so many more are on the Resource Pack guide, and in the e-resources themselves.
