What is Art Therapy?

What is Art Therapy?

Art therapy is the intentional use of art making to explore personal issues or concerns within a therapeutic relationship. Creating art and reflecting on the art symbols, people can increase self-awareness. Being artistic is not necessary to benefit from art therapy. No previous art experience or artistic talent is needed to participate in art therapy. Art therapy is used as a primary form of therapy or serves as an accompanying treatment to other forms of therapy.

Art represents a symbolic communication. The art becomes significant in enhancing verbal exchange between the client and the art therapist. With therapeutic guidance and support, art making can facilitate new insights, expression of emotions, resolve conflicts, and formulate new perceptions that in turn lead to positive changes, growth and healing.

What Art Therapy Can Accomplish?

* Gives another language to what cannot be easily put into words, a symbolic language

* Allows for expression of feelings including anger, rage, sadness, that can be contained in the art work

* Makes abstract feelings and memories concrete, the artist can now physically do something with the negative feelings

* Offers choice making with art materials, thus may bring new insights on how to manage the problem

* Assists in enriching the relationship with oneself and with others

* Allows space to develop a deeper sense of meaning and life purpose

* Can provide a container where unwanted feelings and thoughts can be held outside of the person

* Activates more of the brain than verbal therapy, offering additional coping skills and ideas to solve issues

Info from CarlySullens

Poetry Is Like Music to the Mind, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Reveals

New brain imaging technology is helping researchers to bridge the gap between art and science by mapping the different ways in which the brain responds to poetry and prose.

Scientists at the University of Exeter used state-of-the-art functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology, which allows them to visualise which parts of the brain are activated to process various activities.

No one had previously looked specifically at the differing responses in the brain to poetry and prose.

In research published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, the team found activity in a "reading network" of brain areas which was activated in response to any written material. But they also found that more emotionally charged writing aroused several of the regions in the brain which respond to music. These areas, predominantly on the right side of the brain, had previously been shown as to give rise to the "shivers down the spine" caused by an emotional reaction to music.

When volunteers read one of their favourite passages of poetry, the team found that areas of the brain associated with memory were stimulated more strongly than 'reading areas', indicating that reading a favourite passage is a kind of recollection.

In a specific comparison between poetry and prose, the team found evidence that poetry activates brain areas, such as the posterior cingulate cortex and medial temporal lobes, which have been linked to introspection.

Professor Adam Zeman, a cognitive neurologist from the University of Exeter Medical School, worked with colleagues across Psychology and English to carry out the study on 13 volunteers, all faculty members and senior graduate students in English. Their brain activity was scanned and compared when reading literal prose such as an extract from a heating installation manual, evocative passages from novels, easy and difficult sonnets, as well as their favourite poetry.

Professor Zeman said: "Some people say it is impossible to reconcile science and art, but new brain imaging technology means we are now seeing a growing body of evidence about how the brain responds to the experience of art. This was a preliminary study, but it is all part of work that is helping us to make psychological, biological, anatomical sense of art."

Image from Irene Sheri

Info from Science Daily 

Oliver Sacks discusses changing the brain through meditation and art-therapy

 

Transcript

Question: Is it possible to change the brain with medication?

Oliver Sacks: From what I read, I think that’s all sorts of changes, at least temporary changes may be possible. One can certainly get states of calm and alter the brain rhythms and have states of trance.

Whether they’re permanent changes, I don’t know. But any learning experience changes the brain and nothing more, incidentally, than musical learning, so that the brains of musicians are visibly different and even grossly different from the brains of other people.

 

Question: Are you a proponent of art therapy?

O.S.: Yeah. Very, very strongly.

Most of my own work is with elderly people with neurological problems of one sort or another. And I can see how their lives could be transformed by music and sometimes by poetry and art.

But, say, people with Parkinson’s may be unable to move or speak unless there’s music. People who have Alzheimer’s are confused and lost and agitated or disoriented, can be focused wonderfully sometimes by familiar music, which will give them a link to the past and to their own memories which they can’t access in any other way.

And sometimes people who are aphasic and have lost the power of language can get it back through music.

I don’t have direct experience with young people, but from everything I read, I think that music and other forms of art need to be in a central part of education. This is an essential part of being human.

And although I wouldn’t locate everything in the right hemisphere, we  are not calculating machines. We need the arts as much as we need everything else.

 

Question: Is it possible to enhance your mental abilities by listening to Mozart?

O.S.: Well, this so called "Mozart effect" was described, actually, in a very modest way about 15 years ago and then got taken up by the media and hyped and exaggerated in a way which was rather embarrassing to the original describers.

I think there’s very little to suggest that, although Mozart as background will make any difference, on the other hand, real engagement with music, and especially performing music, or listening attentively, can make a great deal of difference.

And especially early in life.  You’d see this in people, say, who do Suzuki training. And one a year of Suzuki training can not only enhance one's musicality and alter the brain quite visibly, but the effect seems to leak over to some extent into forms of visual thinking and logical thinking, pattern recognition, and so forth.

So, a little musical background is not enough, but real musical engagement, I think, can be very important.

 

Question: Are we living in an over-medicated world? 

O.S.:  [Sigmund] Freud made a point, say, of distinguishing neurotic misery and depression from what he called common unhappiness. If the common unhappiness is what we all feel when we grieve, when we lose people, when things go wrong. 

Prozac has been and can be a life saver for people who are pathologically depressed. Depression is the main cause of suicide, and anti-depressants of all sorts have been very crucial. There are many different sorts, and so Prozac belongs to a particular sort.

But there’s all the difference in the world, having a medication for a pathological state and something which you want to enhance normal living. This becomes a huge issue, whether it’s steroids with athletes or whatever.

If Prozac can produce a bland, nonchalant state, the question is whether such a state is a good one or whether it’s morally responsible. I think one needs to have all one’s emotional sympathies and sensitivities and vulnerabilities out there. 

It sometimes seems as if childhood itself is being, it becomes the diagnosis, becomes a disease. Hundreds of thousands of children, I think, are probably improperly diagnosed as hyper-active or as having attention disorder of one sort or another, and are put on the amphetamines or Ritalin.

And I think there do exist genuine forms of attention hyper-activity disorder which, which may need medication. But I think, these are pretty rare. And I suspect that 9 out of 10 kids who were diagnosed as having this do not have any such syndrome, but are reacting to situations at school or it’s a normal stage of development.

Kids are impulsive. This is the nature of youth. It’s one of the wonders of youth. It’s one of the things one needs to keep all through life.

I think there are real dangers of over medicating children and of us all over medicating ourselves. And it may not stop with over medicating. Because sooner or later, we’d be able to have our genes altered or to have computer chips put in our brain. And the whole business of “an enhanced existence” as opposed to a natural one, is going to come up.

 

 

Arts proven to combat Alzheimers

A soon-to-be-published study, Reawakening the Mind, has confirmed that the mind-body benefit of artistic stimulation. UK organisation Arts 4 Dementia offers statistical proof of the transforming power of the arts in treating patients suffering from memory loss. This latest discovery affirms the health benefits of arts therapies when applied to early dementia sufferers.

A sample group of 41 early dementia sufferers, aged between 66 and 91, participated in workshops in music, drama, poetry, dance, photography and painting. The study assessed the effectiveness of each arts activity in improving cognitive function and wellbeing. Enhanced cognitive ability, stress relief, and a decrease in memory problems were just some of the reported benefits. With each individual participating in at least one activity, the 93 assessments were condensed into the following heartening findings:

• 94% of people with dementia were energised, unstressed, happy and alert for at least 24 hours after an arts session.
• 89% claimed to feel more confident.
• 84% of people with dementia recognised that they had learned new skills.

As a result of the sessions 97% of patients recognised that creative activity overrides memory worries and an impressive 99% of participants planned to develop their art further.

Results of the evaluation, overseen by Professor Paul Camic, Professor of Psychology and Public Health at Canterbury Christ Church University, indicated many positive effects for people with early dementia. “The results from this large-scale evaluation of many different arts-based projects strongly support that participating in the arts in group settings – in different ways and through different media – benefit people with dementia, the people who care for them, and the organisations that offer these programmes, in a significant and profound way”, he reported.

While visual arts generated the greatest immediate sense of achievement it was music and dance that demonstrated a significantly longer energising effect than other art forms, with the results concluding that art practices can combat many of the most difficult effects of early dementia. The results also suggest that arts activity can delay onset.

Reawakening the Mind is one of the first studies to develop a multiple art form model of stimulation activities for people in the early stages of dementia. Arts 4 Dementia Chief Executive, Veronica Franklin Gould, says: “Once dementia has set in, the creative part of the brain can continue to function for many more years and artistic stimulation is a powerful, sociable way to open up communication channels.”

Whilst acknowledging the need for training accreditation in these fields, Arts 4 Dementia are calling on arts organisations to provide practitioners and appealing to doctors to recommend arts activities for patients upon diagnosis.

Info at LimeLight

Art in every form improves quality of life

"As an art therapist, I have spent hundreds of hours witnessing the profound therapeutic effects of art making for adults and children of all ages and with a wide range of physical and psychological conditions. Brain research into neuroplasticity, as Dr. Martiquet points out, shows the beneficial effects of art activity in improving neural networks.

The good news is that our brains, like gardeners, constantly prune away what isn’t used and bud in new directions as we do new things.

Creativity is a powerful source of new life, no matter where a person starts from, and art making is one of the few treatments that is actually inherently pleasurable. Art making can be used in so many ways: problem-solving, expressing what is too complicated or difficult to say with words, focusing, relaxing. And the beauty is that you have a visual record of the process.

I hear so many people say they have no ability, but those are the discouraging messages that people were given as children — I’ve seen over and over that creativity has no limits and no special skill is required to begin.

Art in every form improves quality of life: it is not a luxury, but a cost-effective way to improve our society."

Rose Clarke, Gibsons

Info from Coast Reporter

Art Therapy helps kids cope with grief

based on this article by DAVID SORTINO

One of the many problems counselors and psychologists face is the different emotional and cognitive developmental levels of children they counsel. Children have different ways of expressing themselves, particularly in how they deal with grief and death: some are more verbal and feel comfortable speaking to adults about grief, while others are non-verbal and will internalize it. 

The key factor is the approach the counselor uses to address the children's pain or grief. Most experienced counselors understand these differences and use different modes of therapy to reach individuals, especially young children dealing with death. Fortunately, many grief counselors use the expressive arts, such as art therapy, as their main strategy for helping children deal with often-unspeakable thoughts and emotions associated with death.

Art therapy is to draw, paint, sculpt or use any other medium to express emotion without words. "It's always been a powerful way to express emotions without words,” said art therapist Mary Gambarony of the Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank, N.J. “It allows children to take the pain and to take the sadness, take the frustration, take the questions and put it outside of themselves and that's very healing in itself to get it out of you ... put it on something objective in front of you and be able to look at it.”

When a counselor attempts to help a child speak about a tragedy, he often focuses on the verbal or linguistic areas of the brain, which can negate children whose cognitive processes are more non-verbal. Conversely, forcing only the non-verbal expression does not address the needs of children who can be verbally expressive. Even for the verbal child, discussion does not lead to expressing the depth of grief, while an artistic expression can often allow the experience.

The effectiveness of art therapy is that it addresses both sides of the brain or the child's verbal or non-verbal intelligences and emotions. This is particularly true with the right side of the brain, considered our visual and more emotional side. Although we use both sides simultaneously, some children, especially girls, have an edge because the corpus collossum, a strip that runs down the center of the brain and allows the two halves of the brain to cross talk is larger in girls, an indication of why art therapy can be so effective for girls.

For boys, whose corpus collossum is smaller, they do not have the luxury of being able to cross talk as effectively. However, art therapy can specifically stimulate the right side or visual-emotional side of the boy's brain, which allows for the grief to be looked at openly.

Whatever expressive arts a counselor chooses in dealing with a child's grief, the key is to understand that beyond the different developmental levels of a child's grieving emotions, there are major factors involved in the healing process that go beyond simply talking about a tragic experience. The brain is far more complex and, as such, needs expressive forms of therapy for healing.

Mental illness through art in the next See Me, Hear Me

MACARTHUR region residents are challenging attitudes towards mental illness through art in the next See Me, Hear Me exhibition opening 2nd June.


The Benevolent Society’s annual Campbelltown Arts Centre exhibition will feature until June 12 the artwork of 25 local artists, including Sandi Dennis, living with mental illness. The works will then be on show at local Narellan, Campbelltown, Eagle Vale, Ingleburn and Glenquarie libraries until mid-July.

The Benevolent Society’s Wies Schuiringa said the exhibition gave people living with illness a chance to showcase their skills and step into the limelight.

“We often hear from people living with mental illness that they feel isolated and hidden away, so See Me, Hear Me provides people who live with mental illness an opportunity to have a voice,” Ms Schuiringa said.

“The exhibition not only gives artists an opportunity to show their work and skills, it also gives visitors a chance to see some wonderful local artworks and gain a greater understanding of what’s it’s like to live with mental illness.”

Ms Schuiringa said mental illness was not understood well in the community, but over the past years the exhibition had run, it had proven a powerful way to break down the stigma.

Info accessed at Macarthur Chronicle