Depression Explained With a Dog

I Had a Black Dog, His Name Was Depression is a short video that was released by the World Health Organization about eighteen months ago. I just learned about the video through a Common Craft Tweet. The video uses drawings and narration featuring a big black dog (kind of like Clifford the big red dog) as the representative of what it is like to live with depression. The four minute video does a wonderful job of explaining what depression is, its symptoms, and methods of dealing with depression. The video is embedded below.


Applications for Education
This video could be a great resource for teachers of health as well as for school counselors to have at their disposal. You might consider using the video before having students use go through the Depression Quest interactive story. Depression Quest is a website that features an interactive story designed to educate people about depression. The story puts you in the place of a twenty-something person that is struggling with depression. Throughout the story you are presented with choices to make that influence the next phase of the story. The story has 150 different scenarios and five possible outcomes at the end based on the choices you make as you read through the story.