Spear’s Play Delves into Mental Illness with Winnie the Pooh

LouAnn Spear has been working at FHS for over 17 years. She is very well known around school and has a reputation of assigning students unique assignments. This includes the Winnie the Pooh mental illness play. The play featured many characters from the story, each having a different mental disorder. She had the students in her class act out the parts. This informative and provocative display of academic knowledge was interesting. Within the past few months she has had her students act out the part.

Many of the students were dressed as the characters they were portraying. Winnie the Pooh represented an eating disorder and OCD, Tigger represented ADHD, Rabbit represented narcissistic personality disorder, Piglet represented anxiety, Eeyore represented depression and Christopher Robin represented schizophrenia. The prelude before the main act described all of these disorders and gave a brief introduction of their causes, symptoms, and treatments.

The prelude to the main play was informative. After it ended, the actual acting began. There was a general uneasiness in the audience as it was played out. The play’s story followed as such, it was Winnie the Pooh’s birthday. He was all out of honey, the rest of the characters then go on to search for more honey for Pooh. The premise of the story was questionable, with the characters indulging in Pooh’s OCD. The characters throughout the play stubbled and acted out issues and scenarios correlating with their corresponding disorders.

Towards the end of the play, one of the narrators gets up to act the part of Christopher Robin. Spear then gets up to join her. The teacher asks Chrisopher Robin, “What are you doing?” Christopher Robin responds with, “talking to my friends.” The teacher then said, “Where? There’s no one here.” They then went back and forth discussing the situation in character. The reveal being none of the characters were real and Christopher Robin was a schizophrenic child who had hallucinated the entire situation.