art is healing essay

Essay: Art is more than beauty; it can help us heal

$Sarah Lentini, left, and Dave\id Perotto$

The role of art and creativity in helping us to heal is centuries old. Creation is a natural counterbalance in our lives, giving us ballast and hope — purpose and meaning — in a world that can only too easily and too often be shattered by trauma and loss.

Psychotherapists across the world often employ art therapy strategies as part of a broader approach to help patients deal with painful, sometimes buried, emotions in a safe, supportive environment. Art therapy is especially useful with young children and with adults with limited verbal skills, whose ability to articulate is impossible in literal language.

Art functions as a universal metaphoric language, enabling even a very young child to communicate. Music, theater, dance, literature, and — of course — visual art utilize tone, shape, color, size, juxtapositionand symbol to less directly but often even more powerfully indicate an individual’s inner state of being.

In addition, the very nature of good art is beautifully aligned with the very essence of good therapy: Both move in the realm of the unconscious mind. It is the ability of art to tap into unconscious, unstated thoughts and feelings that gives it exceptional effectiveness as a therapeutic tool.

And of course the importance of harnessing an individual’s creative spirit when faced with destructive forces cannot be overstated. Creativity taps into our goodness, our intelligence, our pathos, our appreciation for beauty, our universality, our desire to communicate, and the very core of what makes us human.

Perhaps no loss is greater, and certainly no loss is more final, than the passing of a loved one. It is no surprise, then, that art therapy is increasingly being seen as an important consideration by mental health and health professionals when addressing issues of grief. What is not common, however, is the development and provision of art therapy programs by funeral homes and other businesses that, while outside the healing professions, come in contact with people in need every day.

Most of us are not comfortable discussing loss nor are we typically encouraged to do so. Beyond this, sometimes words and conventional therapy are not enough. Without intervention, some people remain traumatized and “stuck,” unable to rejoin the world in a constructive and meaningful way. The act of creation can be a powerful way to move through pain and toward life.

We believe that alternative nontraditional approaches for connecting with and helping people find their way after experiencing the trauma of death can play an important role in keeping our community healthy and productive.

Sarah Lentini president and CEO of Greece Regional Chamber of Commerce and David Perotto is president and CEO of Bartolomeo & Perotto Funeral Home, which launched The Art of Healing, an art therapy program, in the Spring.

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The Healing Power Of Art

Whether you toil over an oil canvas or doodle mindlessly on a page, research suggests the act of creating art has powerful healing properties. In a study published in the journal Art Therapy , three-quarters of participants experienced lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol during their 45-minute art-making session – regardless of previous art experience.

“If you can pinch clay or hold a pencil, if you can touch, see, smell or hear, art is for you,” says Mallory Montgomery, an art therapist at Henry Ford Health. “Through art, even people who don’t view themselves as creative end up reconnecting to that childlike sense of play and enjoyment they had when they got their first box of crayons in kindergarten.”

How Art Heals

Here, we ask Montgomery about how art works its magic on both body and mind.

Q: How does art contribute to healing?

A: Art is healing because it forces you to forge a connection between your mind and your body. Unlike exercise , which works your body, or meditation , which clears your mind, art-making accesses both mind and body to promote healing. Every time you sit down to write a song or paint a picture, you’re using mental processes in a physically engaging activity.

Q: How can art help people navigate disease?

A: It is hard to be bogged down in negative feelings and fear when you’re creating a piece of art. Instead, you experience a grounding, present and rewarding sense of connecting with yourself. You can even learn to engage with and interact with your art – asking it questions, engaging in a dialogue with your creation and uncovering information about yourself. It sounds hokey at first, but there’s a world of wisdom to be gained from connecting with yourself in this way.

Q: How do you use art to make meaning?

A: Art therapists use color, lines and symbols to express internal states. So we can tell a person, “If your journey through cancer started with a seed at diagnosis, now that you are in remission, how has that tree grown? What does that seed look like now?” Together, we will unpack what they make. I’ll ask them to tell me about the leaves, the roots, the colors, the apples or flowers. The goal is to help patients look at their art through a lens that provides deeper insight about their journey.

Q: Are there specific techniques that promote healing?

A: For patients who are in pain, we’ll often do “body mapping.” I might give you a literal outline of a human body and ask you to indicate where you have pain with little red dots. Then, I’ll ask you to cover over them, essentially destroying them and transforming them into something new.

Q: What about patients who feel ill-equipped or unable to create?

A: Many of my oncology patients use all of their energy getting in the door for treatment. So instead of asking them to create, I empower them by giving them the creative reins. They tell me what to make and which colors to use. And since they’re in charge, they still get the benefits of accomplishment. When the art is done, whether they made it or made it through my hands, there’s still an emotional and mental dialogue that happens.

Even if you feel like you’re not artistic or creative, art therapy is still a powerful healing tool. The key is breaking through the glass boxes we create for ourselves. “I encourage people to start small with something like a coloring sheet or a simple origami bird,” says Montgomery. “Art therapy is about having fun through self-exploration – not winning an art prize.”

You can even expand beyond “traditional art.” Play with weird materials like cardboard, old clothing or quilting fabric or broaden your definition beyond visual art to include creative endeavors like movement, music or the written word.

If you want more information on Henry Ford’s art therapy programs or would be interested in volunteering, email [email protected] .

Mallory Montgomery has a master of science degree in art therapy and is a Registered Art Therapist-Provisional (ATR-P) and a Registered Behavior Technician (RBT), who works with Henry Ford Cancer patients.

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The Culture of Healing: Louise Glück on Art’s Restorative Power

“The artist, like the analyst, cultivates a disciplined refusal of self-deception, which is less a moral position than a pragmatic act, since the only possible advantage of suffering is that it may afford insight.”

– Louise Glück

Nobel Laureate Louise Glück’s collection of essays on poetry, American Originality, breaks down and examines various notions surrounding contemporary poetry. This short essay titled The Culture of Healing , condemns current trends of pathological optimism , as well as the tendency towards ‘the pornography of scars,’ and the assumption that the best art is inextricably tied to suffering. What art can do for the artist, she argues, is provide a buffer or a respite from pain in order to give form to darkness and perform a very radical transformation from loss .

The Culture of Healing

In regard to the restorative power of art, a distinction must be made between the experience of the reader and the experience of the writer. For the reader, a work of art can make a kind of mantra: by giving form to devastation, the poem rescues the reader from a darkness without shape or gravity; it is an island in a free fall; it becomes his companion in grief, his rescuer, a proof that suffering can be made somehow to yield meaning.

But the relation of the poet to his composition seems to me other.

We live in a culture almost fascistic in its enforcement of optimism. Great shame attaches to the idea and spectacle of ordeal: the incentive to suppress or deny or truncate ordeal is manifested in two extremes—the cult of perfect health (both physical and psychological) and, at the other end, what could be called a pornography of scars, the seemingly endless flood of memoirs and poems and novels rooted in the assumption that the exhibition of suffering must make authentic and potent art. But if suffering is so hard, why should its expression be easy? Trauma and loss are not, in themselves, art: they are like half a metaphor. In fact, the kind of work I mean—however true its personal source—is tainted by a kind of preemptive avidity. It seems too ready to inhabit the most dramatic extremes; too ready to deny loss as continuity, as immutable fact. It proposes instead a narrative of personal triumph, a narrative filled with markers like “growth” and “healing” and “self-realization” and culminating in the soul’s unqualified or comprehensive declaration of wholeness, as though loss were merely a catalyst for self-improvement. But as the power of loss is undermined or denied, so too does the speaker come to seem entirely constructed, inhuman.

.ugb-1f1e1b7 .ugb-blockquote__quote{width:41px !important;height:41px !important;left:22px !important}.ugb-1f1e1b7 .ugb-blockquote__text{font-size:16px !important;color:#15b6b8}.ugb-1f1e1b7 .ugb-blockquote__item{text-align:center !important}.ugb-1f1e1b7.ugb-blockquote{background-color:#f2f2f2}.ugb-1f1e1b7.ugb-blockquote:before{background-image:linear-gradient(90deg,#f2f2f2 33%,#ffffff 100%)} “We live in a culture almost fascistic in its enforcement of optimism. Great shame attaches to the idea and spectacle of ordeal: the incentive to suppress or deny or truncate ordeal is manifested in two extremes—the cult of perfect health and a pornography of scars,”

My own experience of acute suffering, whether in the life or in the work, is that during such periods I do pretty much nothing but try to stay alive, the premise being that if I stay alive I will at least be present in case something changes. I have no sense of myself as trying to effect change. Nor do I believe that the peculiar resilience of the artist is a function of art’s restorative power. The artist’s experience of his own work alternates panic with gratitude. What is constant, what seems to me the source of resilience (or fortitude), is a capacity for intense, driven absorption. Such absorption makes a kind of intermission from the self; it derives, in the artist, from a deep belief in the importance of art (though not necessarily his own art, except in the presence of its being made). At intervals throughout his life, the artist is taken out of that life by concentration; he lives for a time in a suspension that is also a quest, a respite that is also acute tension. His belief in art, and investment in art, in the dream of articulation, project him constantly into the future—the hypothetical moment in which comprehensive darkness acquires limits and form. For nostalgia, it substitutes terror and hunger; for the ideal of restoration it substitutes an ideal of discovery. Toward which end, the artist, like the analyst, cultivates a disciplined refusal of self-deception, which is less a moral position than a pragmatic act, since the only possible advantage of suffering is that it may afford insight.

The great crime writer Ross Macdonald says that he, “like many writers,” “couldn’t work directly with [his) own experiences or feelings.” For Macdonald, a narrator “had to be interposed, like protective lead, between himself and the radioactive material.” For the poet, time suffices, in that it introduces an altered perspective. But those works of art that can be traced directly to specific events—however long after the fact they may be created—involve the artist in a particular relation to these events. The poem is a revenge on loss, which has been forced to yield to a new form, a thing that hadn’t existed in the world before. The loss itself becomes, then, both addition and subtraction: without it, there would not have been this poem, this novel, this work in stone. And a strange sense of betrayal of the past can occur as the absolute of loss becomes ambiguous, the mutilator the benefactor. Such complex doubling of function doesn’t seem to me a thing restored. And the agent of transformation, in any case, is time, which cannot be forced or rushed.

Louise Glück From – American Originality: Essays on Poetry

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The Healing Power of Art From Ancient Times to now

When life resembles a dystopian Netflix special amidst a global health crisis, broken environmental, economic, and judicial systems and with humans physically, emotionally, and spiritually ailing, we are called to consider the meaning of life, and of our lives in particular. Inevitably, the existential inquiry arises:

“Do I have anything significant to contribute as an artist? Can art really make a difference?”

This following collection of anecdotes, from ancient times until now, examines art’s efficacy for healing mind, body, and soul, offering a resounding, fervent, and beseeching Yes. Yes. YES!

The golden ratio, divine ratio, or Fibonacci sequence, after the Italian mathematician from the late 11th century, is an equation that manifests as a pattern abounding in nature and traditional art.

The mathematical knowledge about the divine ratio goes back to ancient Greece; it returned in art and architecture during the Renaissance. It has been used ever since in classical painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and modern graphic design. Even the European norm of DIN A paper sizes are based on the golden ratio.

The reason that this proportion found its use in art and design is that it is very pleasing to the eye and gives a sense of harmony. It might have to do with the fact that the proportional relationship is found in the human body as well as in nature, and automatically when applied makes us feel comfortable.

Artists, aspiring to the sacred act of depicting life, especially those learned in the multi-disciplinary approach of the Renaissance, were, therefore, keen to employ this principle for balance and generative wholeness, as did architects and musicians who followed. The understanding was that exposing oneself with external harmony can help reset, restore, and encourage our system to reorient and recalibrate to its homeostasis.

Is it merely a coincidence that the name ‘Medici’, the family of the high nobility in Florence who inspired the Renaissance by financing the invention of the piano and opera, luminaries like Leonardo Da Vinci, and the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica, is derived from the Latin word which means ‘medicine’?

In ancient Greece, this knowledge was applied to the architectural design of hospitals. Asklepios was the Greek God of medicine. He was the patron God and reputed ancestor of the Asklepiades, an ancient guild of doctors. It was after their traditions that the beatific halls of the Athenian hospitals of the fifth century were named and designed. It was believed the calming aesthetic was crucial to a sense of calmness and hence the cure.

That tradition saw a rebirth in the fourteenth century at the Spadale di Santa Maria in Siena, where frescos by Simone Martini and paintings by Domenico di Bartolo and Lorenzo Vecchietta were commissioned by the city councils to be displayed in the halls!

On a musical note, we could take the story of David and the Harp from the Bible:

“So it came about whenever the evil spirit from God came to Saul, David would take the harp and play it with his hand; and Saul would be refreshed and be well, and the evil spirit would depart from him”. (Samuel I 16:23)

Along with curing fits of anger, nightmares, and the general malaise of King Saul, David’s much sought after harp playing could do away with evil spirits.

The healing effects of the harp get many mentions in ancient textbooks, as well as throughout history. Our ancestors seemed to connect with the knowledge of why or how music wove its magical restorative and balancing spell.

A Harvard study has shown that irregular heartbeats, a condition known as arterial fibrillation, responds to the soothing nature of gentle and relaxing rhythms of music. According to physician Mark Tramo, a part of the brain known as the mesolimbic system is profoundly affected by the auditory nervous system. Dr. Robert Eckel of the American Heart Institute has gone as far as stating “There is no doubt music can decrease the production of stress hormones.”

The Chinese character for “medicine” (藥 yào) even stems from the character for “music” (樂, yuè). These two parts and three meanings altogether give insight into how the ancient Chinese understood medicine. The character 藥 originated from its lower part, 樂, which speaks to the historical use of music to heal illness since Chinese antiquity, even before the discovery of herbal medicine, with a system of certain notes corresponding to specific organs of the body. So music in ancient China was not meant for entertainment alone, but for aligning the body’s energy system with the harmony of sounds and therefore instruments were made for wellbeing.

Returning to visual art, we can reference the increasingly popular and valuable practice of art therapy to understand how seriously art is taken. The concept of ‘art therapy’, the idea that the activity of creating art sparks a new energy that can lead patients to better deal with their conditions, have reduced stress levels and symptoms, and a heightened sense of will power, has gained much popularity.

Additionally, the advertising industry spent millions of dollars, not something they do lightly, in cognitive psychological research, in order to better understand how color affects our moods and perceptions.

The notion that we respond to different vibrations of music, and also the vibrations of light and color frequencies, is not new and the emergent use of ‘Chroma therapy’ which examines the effects of different color pigments using terms like ‘healing colors,’ is being taken very seriously by the medical industry, which now consults with experts on the design and decoration of medical facilities. The object being, to make their facilities less threatening and more welcoming.

These ‘healing colors’ are said to influence our nervous systems, causing changes in mood and promoting a sense of peace and calm.

Danish designer Jacob Olsen quotes what could be considered a shorthand ‘Periodic Table’ for colors, as follows:

Red, as one might guess, is a very stimulating color that can stimulate vitality and energy, it is advised against for patients suffering from hypertension, for example, as it elevates blood pressure and increases adrenalin – not a color that is used liberally in hospitals.

Orange, on the other hand, is said to radiate warmth and a sense of joy and happiness and is used frequently in children’s wards.

Yellow is among the most popular colors for hospitals, being bright and cheerful. It is said to detoxify the mind and inspire creativity. Apparently it must not be overused as it can lead to stomach problems and insomnia.

Green, again, as you might guess, is considered restful and symbolizes growth and renewal. But is also said to encourage equilibrium and is especially good for the heart, lungs, and circulatory system.

Blue is said to be one of the more important healing colors as it is linked with serenity and peacefulness. Thought to lower blood pressure and heart rate, its relaxing effects are believed to be excellent for your eyes, ears, and nose and is also involved with hearing.

Being in the presence of great beauty is both fulfilling and elevating to the spirit. As scientific research suggests, it can actually lower the stress hormone cortisol, which in the system too often can lead to a myriad of degenerative illnesses.

We could, therefore, extrapolate that if traditional arts are healing, one can deduce that discordant or dissident work would be out of alignment with emotional, physical, and spiritual well being. Why else is heavy metal music played loudly to break a prisoner?

From a spiritual perspective, what we align with, or ‘agree’ with, is enhanced or magnified. Not unlike the algorithms on Facebook, that propagate your own belief system by showing you more of what you believe in your news feed.

To gaze upon beautiful art, that is, to ‘take in’ an image through the conscience senses, as well as the sensory organs, work that is intentionally organized, harmonious, and is complete and whole unto itself, balanced and proportioned, polished and refined, then we too, experience wholeness, balance, and refinement of heart and soul, mind and body.

“We were sent into the world alive with beauty. As soon as we choose beauty, unseen forces conspire to guide and encourage us towards unexpected forms of compassion, healing, and creativity,” acknowledged the late Irish writer, philosopher, and poet John O’ Donahue.

Masha Savitz

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How Art Heals: 5 Ways That Art Makes Everything Better

Creativity coach shannon borg provides top tips on the creative life..

Posted April 1, 2021 | Reviewed by Matt Huston

Art fulfills many functions and means many things. No one needs to explain to a child why he or she should draw: children want to draw. To a child, art-making is as natural as eating or breathing. As we get older, our relationship to art shifts, changes, and becomes rather more complicated. Art begins to function in all sorts of ways, from helping marketers sell products to telling truth to power. In today’s post, creativity coach Shannon Borg points out one of art’s most important functions, as a healing agent.

Shannon explained:

In every age, art does a significant amount of work. On a trip to the Portland Art Museum last year, I walked around a corner to be faced with a stunning piece by one of my favorite artists, James Lavadour. I was speechless. I spent 20 minutes looking at it from far away, and close up, and closer. I was transformed into a better version of me, one who can be calm, who can look, and who can live inside a moment and find peace. It was powerful.

As I walked through the museum, I started to think of some of the other things art does for us. From teaching us how to see in linear perspective, to letting everybody know who is in power, the jobs of Art (with a capital A) are many and diverse.

Here are a few of the jobs that Art does:

Teaching history (and revising history)
Instilling beliefs
Glorifying those in power, and instilling fear and awe
Remembering the dead
Seeing the unseen, the poor, and the forgotten
Offering distraction from difficult times by bringing joy and a sense of fun
Expressing the emotions of the artist
Capturing a lifestyle or place in time
Envisioning the future
Creating a new language of color, form, and line
Championing and explaining a political point of view or societal shift

I realized that personally, I was engaging in one of art’s biggest missions: healing. I feel that one important role art is playing in these challenging times is the role of Healer. Here are just a few of the many ways that art heals:

1. Art Lowers Anxiety

Just looking at art can be healing. For centuries, many cultures have used the mandala form as a tool for contemplation and prayer—letting the mind stop on one spot while the natural forces and chaos of the world swirl around you.

2. Art Generates New Solutions

Even the simplest art, like a Japanese enso, is layered with complexity. It's like William Blake’s idea of “the world in a grain of sand.” The more you look, the more ideas reveal themselves, whether the art is simple or complex. It takes time and patience to find, examine, and consider the endless options art offers.

3. Art (Both Making It and Looking at It) Can Have a Role in Therapy

Psychologist Cathy Malchiodi, in her book The Art Therapy Sourcebook , writes that art therapy is “a modality for self-understanding, emotional change, and personal growth.” Yes, focused attention on therapeutic benefits is helpful. But what about most of us who don’t ever go to an actual art therapist? Can art help us? Many artists will tell you that making art is therapeutic and calming, that it helps you calm distracting, negative, and unhelpful thoughts, and that it gets your hands and body working as opposed to only your mind.

4. Art Helps Us Deal with Difficult Realities

Poetry is consoling in times of unrest and pain, illness and grief . The poet Richard Wright wrote more than 4,000 haiku during his last year of illness in Paris. Wright’s daughter Julia said he continued “to spin these poems of light out of the gathering darkness.” Art works like that and serves like that.

5. Art Builds Safe, Meditative, Imaginative Spaces

Making art can break open and free trauma . For me, walking and beachcombing calm my mind’s storm. And then I paint to have a similar experience or visit galleries or art online to experience how other artists have translated their emotions and observations into healing messages. In these ways, I experience a pure connection to imagination , the land where everything is okay for a little while.

Eric Maisel, Ph.D. , is the author of more than 50 books, among them Redesign Your Mind.

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Black and white photo of an exhibition featuring wiry craft projects on a white shelf, and large photographs of people in hospitals making art as part of therapy programs

The Healing Museum

The idea that making and experiencing art can be therapeutic pervades contemporary culture, so it is no surprise that museums are responding to the collective trauma of Covid-19 by addressing concerns of mental and physical health with unprecedented intensity. The past sixteen months have witnessed a profusion of museum-based healing initiatives. The Queens Museum in New York launched La Ventanita/The Little Window, an online art therapy program for recent immigrants and students at local elementary schools. The Tampa Museum of Art is expanding in-person and virtual offerings in Connections, a community art engagement program geared toward people with depression, memory loss, and PTSD. In Doha, Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar is teaming up with the National Museum of Qatar to design a telehealth art therapy program to alleviate children’s anxiety and depression. The Rubin Museum of Art in New York developed an online “care package” with an option to meditate amid chanting monks in a virtual version of its shrine room.

Simone leigh: the privacy to heal, in melancholy prints and drawings, käthe kollwitz opened eyes to the many sorrows she witnessed.

Indeed, there are few institutions that have not developed multiple programs and exhibitions intended to heal. Sometimes coupled with racial justice initiatives inspired by last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, new curatorial projects—often online and produced by necessity on a shoestring budget—foreground issues of wellness, self-care, harm reduction, illness, disability, access, and mourning. These include the “Care Syllabus” at Mass MoCA, “Mending the Sky” at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and “Healing, Knowing, Seeing the Body” at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.

Is this flurry of healing cultural initiatives a faddish effort to entice well-meaning funders? While the pandemic has heightened the art world’s promotion of therapy, museums and galleries have long been actively involved in discussions about art’s relationship to health. In 2017 the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts hired a full-time art therapist and permitted physicians to formally “prescribe” free access to their galleries—a novelty that garnered much media attention inside and outside the art world. But this is just one of the latest twists in an eighty-year history of museums designing exhibitions, research projects, and educational programs about the therapeutic possibilities of art and art-making. What’s more, museum exhibitions and other programming efforts directly contributed to the development of art therapy, a professional specialization in the mental health field that arose in the 1940s and 1950s. The Museum of Modern Art in New York was one influential institutional leader grappling with the nexus of art and health at that time. The history of health-related projects at MoMA demonstrates how museums have shaped trajectories of therapy in public culture—and suggests they are poised to do so again.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an assortment of European and American psychologists, educators, artists, art historians, and social reformers puzzled out the relationship between art and health, with an emphasis on mental well-being. As the revolutionary psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung circulated and gained traction within psychology and across society, there was growing interest in artistic expression as a window into the inner workings of the mind. Influenced by dreams and the concept of the unconscious, Surrealists cultivated techniques like exquisite corpse and automatic drawing to liberate themselves from conscious control over the artistic process.

At the same time, mental health experts such as German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn and Austrian art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris attempted to find meaning in the mysterious art produced by patients at asylums, people with cognitive disabilities, and children. Later classified as Art Brut by artist Jean Dubuffet and as “outsider art” by critic Roger Cardinal, these works were objects of voracious curiosity for avant-garde artists, who yearned for their own creative output to possess the same spirit of spontaneity and authenticity. In the field of art education, meanwhile, Austrian Franz Cizek and American Florence Cane borrowed from psychoanalytic methods to teach children to express themselves freely through drawing or painting. John Dewey, an influential American philosopher and social reformer, wrote extensively on the importance of art-making in education, psychology, and democracy. Elsewhere, occupational therapists in Britain and America incorporated arts and crafts into a regimen of not only psychological but also physical recuperation.

From radically different professional vantage points, these thinkers and practitioners wondered whether making art could be healing, either mentally or physically. Could making a gouache painting or sewing a quilt have positive effects on the psyche as well as the body? Could drawing be integrated into psychoanalytic treatment? What could psychologists and psychiatrists learn about mental illness and cognitive disability from a ceramic sculpture? Could a mental health professional study a patient’s sketch and, based on that observation (in addition to other forms of assessment), offer a diagnosis of schizophrenia, or declare that nothing was wrong at all? While there was no consensus on the precise therapeutic value of art and art-making, this eclectic group of thinkers and practitioners agreed on the potential for cogent interdisciplinary work.

Some of these debates took place at galleries and museums in New York City in the mid-1930s. In 1936, Midtown Galleries showed artworks by patients from European asylums, including some from Prinzhorn’s famous collection, and MoMA had a pathbreaking exhibition titled “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” a year later. Curated by the museum’s inaugural director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., this show boldly put art by renowned Surrealists into dialogue with drawings by psychiatric patients. In one instance, André Masson’s whimsical automatic drawing Birth of Birds (1925), an elusive conglomeration of plant and animal imagery, was juxtaposed with a compelling yet anonymous “psychopathic drawing” (undated) that depicted a tangle of morose faces and finlike limbs.

Pointing out the formal similarities between the two works, Barr suggested in his catalogue essay that the Surrealists deserved praise for their skillful imitation of the art by children and people with psychiatric diagnoses. But a “psychopathic drawing” was not a veritable artwork, due to the mental state of its maker. Even if the curator’s comment was consistent with ingrained cultural beliefs about psychiatric patients and people with cognitive disabilities, not to mention the highly calculated constructions of a modernist like Masson, it is problematic to measure an artwork’s value along these discriminatory lines. Moreover, we can safely assume that the unknown maker of the decontextualized “psychopathic drawing” had little agency with regard to its curatorial inclusion and display. Barr’s insistence on the unbreakable divide between normal artistic genius and clinical psychopathology is curious, as he himself had suffered a nervous breakdown just a few years earlier. Due to his plummeting mental health, he had to take a long break from his museum duties. From 1932 to 1933, he recuperated discreetly in Europe.

Though not about art as therapy per se, the exhibitions at Midtown Galleries and MoMA posited an intrinsic link between artistic production and psychological interiority, something considered from a more rigorous clinical perspective in “Art and Psychopathology” at the Harlem Community Art Center in 1938. Organized by Lauretta Bender, a doctor at the psychiatric division of Bellevue Hospital, the exhibition presented drawings and paintings made by juvenile and adult psychiatric patients in observation wards at Bellevue, exploring connections between art-making, psychiatric diagnosis, and therapy. Without fixed methods, art teachers rather than trained therapists helped patients make these works (at the time, art therapy did not exist). More than an exhibition, “Art and Psychopathology” was an opportunity for research, as three well-attended conferences on the subject that brought together artists, teachers, and psychiatrists made clear.

After World War II, when many veterans came home shell-shocked or maimed, the relationship between art and health became even more salient. MoMA transformed from an elite museum of avant-garde culture to a laboratory of national rehabilitation. Seven years after “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” whose understanding of mental health and pathology today seems deeply flawed, MoMA set out to do something different: to illustrate that art-making could treat, and even cure, the psychological and physical damage of war.

Even if the Surrealists celebrated the writings of Freud and Jung, the type of therapy that most interested museum professionals at MoMA was not psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, but occupational therapy. Combining physical and psychological rehabilitation, occupational therapy crystallized as a health care field in Britain and the US toward the end of World War I, though the British Arts and Crafts movement, sparked by John Ruskin and William Morris in the late nineteenth century, was an inspiration for early practitioners, who similarly championed the social value of traditional craft and skilled manual work. A basic tenet of occupational therapy was that a patient could heal by undertaking “occupations” or manual activities, many of which revolved around traditional arts and crafts practices. By weaving a basket or carving a wooden bowl, an injured veteran might be able to regain his sense of worth and productivity, build self-discipline, and learn new technical or professional skills. In this way, activities such as woodworking, beading, sewing, basket weaving, and embroidering were regarded as vehicles for health. This understanding of individual health was inseparable from the imperative of quickly returning to the workplace as a productive member of society.

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, principles of occupational therapy resonated strongly with Dewey’s notion of art education as a means of skill cultivation and citizen-rearing, an approach that informed not only the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, but also MoMA’s fledgling education department, then under the leadership of its founder, Victor D’Amico. The museum’s earliest explicit engagement with occupational therapy occurred in late 1942 with the launch of a competition. A collaborative effort between MoMA, the American Occupational Therapy Association, and the local chapter of the Junior League, this contest asked artists, designers, and therapists from around the country to submit “attractive and useful” designs and objects that could serve as prototypes for recuperating soldiers and sailors in occupational therapy programs. By producing objects based on these artistic models, it was also hoped, the patients would establish a source of income. There were twenty-three winners, collectively awarded $500 for their creative works, which included block prints, paper constructions, woven rugs, metalwork, pottery, and more. Fascinatingly, both Alexander Calder and Masson—whose drawing appeared in “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism”—produced designs for the contest to drum up publicity. Due to their fame, however, neither artist was eligible to win.

The successful contest entries formed a key section of “The Arts in Therapy,” curated by James Thrall Soby, then director of MoMA’s Armed Services Program, a new institutional partnership that lent art books and photographs to military bases. Opening on February 3, 1943, the show, divided in two, brought into focus competing understandings of art as therapy: occupational therapy versus “creative therapy,” an ambiguous placeholder for psychotherapy that embraced art-making. This would soon come to be understood as art therapy. Along with the winning designs, the occupational therapy part comprised more than one hundred objects created by wounded patients on the road to recovery. According to the press release, the creative therapy section, meanwhile, emphasized “the use of free media in art—painting, sculpture, drawing, etc.—employed as a means of both diagnosis and cure, with more than one hundred and fifty examples executed by both normal and mentally disturbed individuals.” In addition to mounting the patriotic exhibition, MoMA devoted the February 1943 issue of its magazine, The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art , to the topic of art as therapy, featuring essays by specialists in psychiatry, psychology, and art education. From 1943 to 1946, “The Arts in Therapy” traveled to thirty-three educational and art institutions across America.

Though the show was generally considered a triumph, it did not please everyone. Margaret Naumburg, a prominent progressive educator who was in the middle of conducting research on the use of the arts in psychotherapy at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, was a sharp critic. As a matter of fact, she had been a consultant to Soby’s exhibition from its conception, even lending a crayon drawing by one of her patients to the creative therapy section.

During the show’s development, she pushed for greater representation of the benefits of art-making in psychotherapy—and less attention to the task-driven methods and inherently competitive ethos of occupational therapy. After finally seeing the show, Naumburg was frustrated by the curator’s inadequate contextualization of her research as well as his bias toward occupational therapy (MoMA put on an additional exhibition focused solely on occupational therapy in June 1943). While she ultimately did not publish a negative review of “The Arts in Therapy” in the Nation , as she had once planned, the uneven show helped her consolidate some of her ideas about “‘free’ art expression” in opposition to occupational therapy. By 1950, “‘free’ art expression” was usually simplified to “art therapy,” designating a type of psychotherapy that utilized artistic practices and interventions, in addition to talk, as the primary treatment method. Today, Naumburg, who went on to publish several books and organize exhibitions detailing this research over the next two decades, is revered as a founding figure of art therapy, along with other pioneers such as Edith Kramer, Hanna Kwiatkowska, and Elinor Ulman.

The Covid-19 pandemic was and continues to be a global rupture of our economic, political, cultural, and medical ecosystems. The long-term physical and mental health consequences of contracting the virus—and of living through the pandemic—are impossible to forecast. When museums position themselves as therapeutic arenas of art and art-making, it is natural to be somewhat cynical. But, as historical exhibitions about the arts, health, and disability reveal, museums have long catalogued, researched, promoted, and catalyzed new therapeutic forms of aesthetic experience—even if, at times, these efforts were marked by offensive treatment of disabled individuals. One of the most promising developments at art institutions during the pandemic is an increasing awareness of disability justice, whether it’s spotlighting the art of disabled practitioners who might have been marginalized in the past, or rethinking physical and virtual spaces and programming to include a fuller spectrum of accessibility and inclusivity. Museums are absolutely correct in one regard: as a culture we need therapy more than ever. Let’s hope that they draw on their resources, work ethically with communities, and support the growth of innovative and meaningful artistic practices of healing that meet today’s challenges.

This article appears in the September/October 2021 issue, pp. 58–63

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Does art heal, at shands healthcare in florida, artists and physicians have been partners for 18 years, reports meera lee sethi . their program is helping to prove the clinical benefits of creativity..

Seven-year-old Catriona Chennell’s room is filled with samples of her artwork: strings of differently-shaped beads, a painting of a rainbow blazing across a blue sky. For her most ambitious—and painstaking—piece so far, she glued small red and glass tiles onto a piece of ceramic about the length of her arm, shaped like a heart with wings.

The image is apt. Cat (as everyone calls her) has primary pulmonary hypertension (PPH), a rare and potentially life-threatening disorder characterized by abnormally high pressure in the artery carrying blood from the heart to the lungs. Like others with PPH, Cat’s heart is slowly enlarging from the stress of pumping hard enough to overcome the increased pressure. She experiences fatigue, pain, dizziness, and shortness of breath. “I also have a chest port,” she says, “so it doesn’t really feel comfortable.” This device, implanted beneath Cat’s skin, delivers a medication that dilates her blood vessels. “We’re talking about a seriously fragile kid,” says her grandmother, Lila Johnston.

Cat’s art decorates her room in the pediatric intensive care unit at Shands at the University of Florida, the hospital in Gainesville where she has spent six months waiting for a heart-lung transplant that may one day enable her to play soccer—her second favorite hobby.

But Cat is too busy to dwell on her discomfort. Instead of spending time only with “my boring parents,” she is regularly visited by artists offering materials, project ideas, and instruction—part of a unique therapeutic program at Shands known as Arts in Medicine (AIM). Cat has been at two other hospitals in Florida, but only here has she been given the opportunity to create art. “What a tremendous difference,” says her grandmother. “It really gets her mind off things.” For Cat, the point is simple. “I feel really good when I do art,” she says.

Cat is just one of thousands of patients to have been reached by AIM through Shands HealthCare, a network of hospitals and outpatient services affiliated with the University of Florida. Through the AIM program, paid artists-in-residence and volunteers involve patients in creative activities like painting, writing, and singing. While the occasional hospital clown or musician is not uncommon elsewhere, Shands is the first institution of its kind to fully integrate the arts into its medical model. The AIM program doesn’t just operate once a month or week; it’s part of the care that patients receive every day, and AIM artists are in constant contact with physicians and nurses.

For years, AIM has been making hospital experiences less stressful. Staff and patients believe it has also done something more remarkable: improve patients’ health. Now, research documenting the therapeutic benefits of the arts is helping to explain why that might be the case. Together with stories from AIM, science is raising the provocative question: Does art heal?

My patient needs an artist

In 1990, John Graham-Pole was a pediatric oncologist at Shands with 25 years of medical experience. He was also a poet. Frustrated that “the art of medicine was getting lost under the weight of medical technology,” Graham-Pole began writing poems about the hospital. Poetry helped him come to terms with the reality of death, and he found solace in examining difficult experiences through the lens of art.

Wanting to share this experience, Graham-Pole and a fellow artist began holding their own informal arts workshops in a single hospital unit. He says their goal was never “curing disease.” Instead, they hoped to help both patients and staff “cope better with whatever was happening to them” through writing and painting. At first, Graham-Pole recalls, most doctors “couldn’t quite understand what this was about. But we became more and more bold with our presence in and around wards.”

Today, 18 years after its humble beginning, AIM runs on an annual budget of more than $350,000, operates in five different hospitals, and recruits 150 volunteers per year to support more than a dozen paid artists-in-residence. The artists each spend 10 to 20 hours a week in the hospital, using their professional expertise to organize a dizzying array of activities. On a typical day, one might hear a banjo player and a transplant patient singing together, see a dancer and a bed-ridden patient moving their arms in slow, undulating waves, or encounter a theatrical performance in a hospital atrium. And AIM programs reach beyond patients: Medical students participate in reflective writing exercises, there are weekly meditation classes for nurses and doctors, and visiting family members are often drawn into AIM sessions. Shands also installs fine art and patient art—like Cat’s heart with wings—on hospital walls.

AIM artists are overseen by a small group of administrative staff, who hold weekly conferences and receive patient referrals. Tina Mullen, AIM’s director, explains that clinicians at Shands don’t see art as a frill at the hospital; they’re convinced it provides real health benefits. That’s why they take the time to make referrals. “The nursing staff and medical staff are making judgments about when to use art as one of the therapies at their disposal,” says Mullen. “They’re saying, ‘My patient needs to see an artist today.’”

Research suggests that such judgments are grounded in scientific evidence. A study at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 2001, for example, found that patients who listened to their choice of music before, during, and after eye surgery experienced lower blood pressure and heart rates, and less perceived stress. In another study, published in the February 2006 issue of the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management , cancer patients who participated in a visual art session reported feeling less pain, tiredness, drowsiness, and breathlessness afterwards.

Indeed, scientists have documented health benefits from exposure to art at all stages of life. Lullabies have been shown to promote neurological development and weight gain in premature infants, while dance appears to help elderly patients with dementia retain greater intellectual, emotional, and motor functions.

To Lauren Arce, a transplant nurse at Shands and a dancer-in-residence, AIM brings these kinds of results to life. In her decade with the program, she says she’s seen the arts bring a host of improvements to patients’ health, from reduced anxiety and shorter hospital stays to diminished feelings of pain and lower blood pressure.

Arce recalls a 12-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis, struggling with the final stages of her disease. Two AIM artists, a painter and a musician, visited her room bearing rocks for a medicine wheel, a traditional Native American artifact associated with healing. The girl had an elevated heart rate and low blood saturation—low levels of oxygen in her bloodstream—and was too weak and uncomfortable to paint a rock herself. But she picked out several for her family and instructed the artist to paint specific images on each of them. She also requested a song from the musician: “Amazing Grace.” As the song played, says Arce, the adults in the room were in tears, but the girl seemed to become more comfortable. “You could see her muscles relaxing, her blood pressure lowering, her heart rate going down, her blood saturation levels going up,” she says.

This would not surprise Graham-Pole, who tells of a Shands patient with a particularly painful case of sickle-cell disease. Movement sessions with dancer-in-residence Jill Sonke-Henderson brought her so much relief that her doctors soon became used to an unusual cry: “Don’t give me morphine, just bring the dancer!”

Other effects are more subtle. Sonke-Henderson notes that positive experiences with movement can be therapeutic for people who feel disconnected from, or “let down” by, their bodies. She describes going through an exercise with a bone marrow transplant patient who said the beach was her favorite place. They closed their eyes, stretched their arms toward the horizon, and reached down as if to scoop up water. Then, Sonke-Henderson recalls, the patient “took a deep breath and said, ‘Now I know I’m going to be all right; the seashells all turned to jewels.’”

The image is startlingly ethereal, but seeing those jewels may have had a concrete physiological impact. A 2007 study from the Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, for instance, found that pre-surgery optimism in bone marrow transplant patients is associated with better survival rates in the first year after surgery.

More than a diagnosis

Why might the arts provide such benefits? Artists at Shands have some ideas. They say artistic processes restore a sense of identity and agency that hospitalization takes away. Barb Esrig, once attended by AIM artists after a car wreck broke 164 bones in her body, now interviews Shands patients for oral histories. She says AIM “reminds people they’re a whole lot more than just a disease process or a diagnosis. We find out who they are outside of the hospital gown.”

Paula Patterson agrees. She leads a theater troupe whose members listen to patients speak about their lives, then “play back” the patients’ stories by transforming them into theater pieces. Patterson remembers a patient who, enthralled by seeing her life turned into drama, decided to join the group herself. The woman had an IV pole by her side, so she draped it in black cloth and gamely dubbed it “Ivy.”

“She learned that her story was worthy of being art,” says Patterson. “And when she became a performer, rather than being the person who always received help, she could be giving help to others.”

Some scientists believe that such feelings of control and mastery trigger an increase in the production of disease-fighting cells. A 2004 study found that HIV-positive patients who engaged in expressive writing, or writing exercises specifically designed to help them process traumatic events, had higher levels of a particular group of white blood cells known as CD4 lymphocytes.

Other research reveals different mechanisms by which art may improve health. A 2006 study tested the saliva of college-aged singers before and after rehearsals. Singing appeared to raise their levels of salivary immunoglobulin, a substance that defends the respiratory tract against pathogens. And singers who were pleased with their performances had lower levels of cortisol, a hormone that is a marker for stress, in their saliva. In other words, artistic engagement doesn’t just make people feel better in the moment—it may protect their future health by boosting their immune systems.

The arts can play a role in medicine in more basic ways. When a physician at Shands studied the health of patients at an outpatient hemodialysis unit, he found that AIM patients not only gained less weight (a good thing for many of those on dialysis therapy), lowered blood pressure, and improved mood, they were also more likely to take their medication consistently after they left the clinic, reducing their risk of complications. Findings like this, Mullen explains, are why “more and more institutions are coming to Shands and saying, ‘We’d like to learn about this!’”

Graham-Pole, now retired, envisions a world in which art is an integral part of every health care system. He says a model of medicine that embraces the arts is extremely cost-effective when one considers the impact of the AIM program and its “tiny” budget, relative to the overall cost of running a hospital.

“Art is a social determinant of our health,” he says. “It doesn’t cure a particular disease, but benefits whatever ails you.”

About the Author

Meera lee sethi.

Meera Lee Sethi is a Chicago-based writer and a contributing editor for Utata.org.

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How confirming to see that the arts are respected and well utilized at Shands Hospital. Sutter Health and the greated Sacramento community has also supported art therapy programs at their health centers, both inpatient and outpatient. The Children’s Bereavement Art Group celebrates its 25th anniversay this year, serving over 9200 grieving children and teens through the majesty and mystery of art making as a healing process. Bravo to all the artists-in-residence and the support staff that makes your program happen!

Peggy Gulshen | 3:50 pm, May 27, 2010 | Link

Art definitely heals, I agree…

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Truly phenomenal! Real good read.

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Sutter Health and the greated Sacramento community has also supported art therapy programs at their health centers, both inpatient and outpatient.

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Course Syllabus

The Healing Power of the Artful Essay

Creating images and scenes and shaping our stories— transforming experience into art—can also transform our selves..

Studies of expressive arts therapy show that the act of writing can be profoundly therapeutic. They also show many intersections between techniques that put the “creative” in creative nonfiction and writing techniques that can aid in coping and healing, lower blood pressure, and strengthen the immune system. Drawing from Natalie Goldberg’s use of writing as a kind of Zen meditation, James Pennebaker’s studies of expressive art, and Louise DeSalvo’s examination of writing as a means of healing, among others, this workshop will explore the many ways in which creating images and scenes and shaping our stories, transforming experience into art, can also transform us.

How it works:

Each week provides:

discussions of assigned readings and other general writing topics with peers and the instructor
written lectures and a selection of reading

Some weeks also include:

writing prompts and/or assignments
opportunities to submit a full-length essay or essays for instructor and/or peer review (up to 3,500 words)
an optional video conference that is open to all students (and which will be available afterward as a recording for those who cannot participate)

Aside from the live conference, there is no need to be online at any particular time of day. To create a better classroom experience for all, you are expected to participate weekly in class discussions to receive instructor feedback on your work.

WEEK 1: THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN EXPRESSIVE ARTS AND ARTISTIC WRITING

When many people think of therapeutic writing, they imagine writing about traumas or unresolved issues. That can be an important dimension of writing as a healing art, but there are other therapeutic uses of writing, too. This week, we’ll look at some of the ways that writing can help us to de-stress and redirect our focus as well as how writing about the struggles we have faced can help us to cope. We’ll explore the field of expressive arts therapy and the ideas of researchers like James Pennebaker and writers like Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron, Louise DeSalvo, and Diana Raab. We’ll begin with a short writing exercise.

WEEK 2: EXPLORING TECHNIQUES OF WRITING TO PROMOTE HEALING

Both traditional and nontraditional ideas of narrative can offer us models for thinking about our experiences—moments of revelation, transformation, understanding, forgiveness, and perspective. This week, we’ll delve more deeply into mindsets, techniques, and processes that have proven to be valuable for healing purposes; discuss approaches that inhibit us; look at some essays that exemplify both healing and artistic techniques; and try out some more exercises to start building your own essays that borrow from these ideas.

WEEK 3: THE FRAGMENTED ESSAY, THE WHOLE SELF

Lyric essays, particularly collages, braids, lists, and other forms that use fragmentation, can offer useful ways to explore our experiences and sometimes even shift our vision as we find connections between seemingly unrelated material. These forms may be ends in themselves, or they may give us techniques we can integrate into other approaches. This week, we’ll look at a variety of examples and explore a variety of techniques that can assist in developing your essay in progress, discuss the stages of the writing process, and continue to work on exercises that will lead us toward a skeleton draft of a piece.

WEEK 4: THE VALUE OF REVISION TO AID IN HEALING AND DISCOVERY

How can the revision process—the deepening of ideas, the development of scenes and image patterns, the enlarging of symbols, the heightening of important moments—help us to understand the patterns in both our narratives and our lives and give us a new perspective? We’ll learn about approaches to revision and consider how revisiting, rethinking, recasting, reshaping, and fleshing out experience can help us discover layers of meaning and lead us to a greater sense of health and wholeness. Turn in your essay this week for feedback.

WEEK 5: SHARING, RESPONDING, REFLECTING

This week we’ll consider ways we can respond to others’ work that are not only supportive and nurturing, but that also ultimately can make us better writers. We’ll end this course by reflecting on our own experiences of healing through writing and ways of moving forward to continue to integrate these ideas into our processes and the stories we write.

Healing Path and Impact of Healer’s Art Essay

Introduction.

Contrary to popular opinions, healthcare is not just about unpleasant medicine or lengthy procedures. It also features pleasant activities, such as drawing, writing, reading, etc. While it may seem odd at first, even those leisure activities can provide doctors with important data on recovery processes and how a certain activity may affect it. The following essay will touch on some leisure activities and their impact on a patient’s recovery.

Leisure Activities and Their Impact on a Patient’s Recovery

In the article called Healing in Spaces, Cheryl Dellasega touched on her experiences as a nurse in “The Crescent” and hosting an orthopedic art exhibit. This opportunity was very important for her because the waiting room and the Pain Clinic looked very grim and upsetting. The exhibit had very strict rules about the art being shown here. This, in turn, is why Dellasega was very frightened when she got a request to call a patient room about it. Fortunately, the art actually made the harsh days of a patient and her mother much better.

As mentioned earlier, leisure activities can be used as a topic of medical research. During the research for an article from the Elsevier Journal, twenty-two cancer survivors were invited to attend tango classes. This was conducted in order to review the impact this activity has on the symptoms of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy and how it affected their motor functions. While the psychological aspect was not reviewed in that research, there was a lot of other interesting data.

Firstly, all of the patients who attended those classes were equally satisfied by that activity. Secondly, posture improved among those patients who previously struggled with balance function issues. Thirdly, those who came with a partner attended those classes more frequently. Music has been known for reducing pain, thus, rhythmic music improved neuromotor functions in the cancer survivors who took part in the tango classes. The movement also played a significant role in restoring balance functions among the patients.

Finally, the topic of leisure activity and its impact on patients has also been touched in the novel-based movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was inspired by real events. The protagonist of the story, Jean-Dominique Bauby, developed locked-in syndrome after suffering a stroke and having been in a three-week coma. The man only had movement in his left eye, so his therapist created a system of communication to help him talk to other people. This system involved her reading letters and him blinking whenever she would name the right one. While the process was rather time-consuming for him, Bauby still decided to write a book for his deal.

However, he chose to change the topic by making it revolve around his experience with locked-in syndrome. Throughout the story, he depicted himself as being in a vintage deep-sea diving suit, with everyone around him being able to see his soul, represented by a butterfly. Not only did Bauby touch on his goals and regrets, but he also realized he knew people with experiences similar to his, such as his 92-year-old father, who is too frail to go outside the perimeter of his own house.

In conclusion, while leisure activities may seem to be too odd to be seen as helpful, they actually are. Art, dancing, writing, and many other activities can not only be used as a way to improve a patient’s mental state. They can also be used for research and how it affects their healing process. That way, they prove to be just as important for a patient’s recovery, as medicine and certain procedures are.

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IvyPanda. (2023, March 9). Healing Path and Impact of Healer’s Art. https://ivypanda.com/essays/healing-path-and-impact-of-healers-art/

"Healing Path and Impact of Healer’s Art." IvyPanda , 9 Mar. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/healing-path-and-impact-of-healers-art/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Healing Path and Impact of Healer’s Art'. 9 March.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Healing Path and Impact of Healer’s Art." March 9, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/healing-path-and-impact-of-healers-art/.

1. IvyPanda . "Healing Path and Impact of Healer’s Art." March 9, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/healing-path-and-impact-of-healers-art/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Healing Path and Impact of Healer’s Art." March 9, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/healing-path-and-impact-of-healers-art/.

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Art Therapy with Kimberly

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Quotes on the healing power of Art Therapy

Quotes about art therapy | Kimberly Hetherington

The ability to be creative and engage in any type of art is an important aspect in reducing stress and increasing well-being. It is also one of the most cost effective, non-invasive, as well as a non-pharmacological technique in reducing negative mental health symptoms.

Participating in creative activities helps people cope with stress and despair and alleviate the burden of chronic mental illnesses [ 7 ]. Cultures all over the world consider artistic expression an important aspect of the healing process. Throughout history, people have used paintings, storytelling, dances, yoga, and chants as healing rituals [ 7 , 34 , 35 ]. Over the last decade, health psychologists have carefully examined how art therapy help heal emotional traumas, enhance awareness of oneself and others, establish self-reflection capacity, reduce mental manifestations, and transform behaviours and way of thinking.

I’ve seen the positive effects of engaging in art therapy firsthand while studying transpersonal art therapy. It’s helped me so much in managing my own anxiety, I hope others who are seeking support can experience it themselves. These are a few quotes I’ve come across that describe how incredible the field of Art Therapy truly is.

“Expressive art therapy integrates all of the arts in a safe, non-judgmental setting to facilitate personal growth and healing. To use the arts expressively means going into our inner realms to discover feelings and to express them through visual art, movement, sound, writing or drama. This process fosters release, self-understanding, insight and awakens creativity and transpersonal states of consciousness . ” – Natalie Rogers ⋆ “It’s not about being good at creativity, it’s about creativity being good for you.” ⋆ “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” – Anais Nin ⋆ “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” – Pablo Picasso ⋆ “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” – Thomas Merton

“At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.” ― Rachel Naomi Remen ⋆ “Art speaks where words are unable to explain.” – Pam Holland ⋆ “Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realising one’s sensations.” – Paul Cézanne ⋆ “I applied streaks and blobs of colours onto the canvas with a palette knife, and I made them sing with all the intensity I could…” – Wassily Kandinsky ⋆ “I could say things with color and shape that I couldn’t’ say any other way – things I had no words for…” – Margaret Naumburg ⋆ “ Art is the activity by which a person, having experienced an emotion, intentionally transmits it to others.” – Leo Tolstoy

“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.” – Henry Ward Beecher ⋆ “Great art picks up where nature ends.” – Marc Chagall ⋆ “I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.” – Georgia O’Keefe ⋆ “If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” – Vincent Van Gogh ⋆ “If an art installation gets a patient out of his room or paintings take a person’s mind off their pain and lower their stress levels, the art isn’t just decorative anymore. It’s part of the entire model of care.” – Dr. Lisa Harris

“The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician. Therefore the physician must start from nature, with an open mind.” – Paracelsus ⋆ “Art can permeate the very deepest part of us, where no words exist.” ― Eileen Miller ⋆ “Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world & through it I’ll walk myself home.” ― Nikki Rowe ⋆ “Creating artwork allows your mind to be in a safe place while it contemplates the tougher issues you are dealing with. One can use the tools of brush, paint, pastels, crayons etc to expose and even for a short time color those issues in a different light.” ― George E. Miller ⋆ “I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully & as carefully as you can—in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal—but then you need to do that—then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church—your cathedral—the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them—then you will lose your soul—for in that book is your soul.” ― Carl Jung ⋆ “Life is full of challenges. We all have them. Art has helped me through my own deep valleys.” ― Sarah Jio

Want to try art therapy?

My name is Kimberly Hetherington and I’m a certified transpersonal art therapist and meditation teacher.

Contact me at [email protected] or follow me on:

Art making and expressive art therapy in adult health and nursing care: A scoping review

Heli vaartio-rajalin.

a Health Sciences, Åbo Akademi University, Vasa, Finland

b Bachelor of Healthcare/Nursing, Novia University of Applied Sciences, Åbo, Finland

Regina Santamäki-Fischer

Pamela jokisalo, lisbeth fagerström.

c Health Sciences, University of South-Eastern Norway, Kongsberg, Norway

Associated Data

While receptive art engagement is known to promote health and wellbeing, active art engagement has not been fully explored in health and nursing care. This review is to describe the existing knowledge on art making and expressive art therapy in adult health and nursing care between 2010 and 2020.

Relevant studies and grey literature were searched and identified between March 17 and April 10, 2020 from EBSCO, CINAHL, Medline and ERIC databases and a general Internet search. Following data charting and extraction, the data ( n = 42 papers) were summarized and reported in accordance with PRISMA-ScR guidelines.

In the included papers, both art making and expressive art therapy were seen in different health care and nursing contexts: yet not the home care context. The emphasis of art activities were group activities for chronically or terminally ill residents, adults aged 65 years or older. A focus on personal narrative was often seen, which may explain why art activities appear to be linked to acknowledging and building new strengths and skills, making meaning of experiences, personal growth, symptom alleviation, and communication; all used to foster collaboration between patients, patients’ near-ones and health care professionals.

Conclusions

Art activities appear to be suitable for every context and can promote personcenteredness and the measurement of nursing outcomes, and they should be considered an essential part of health and nursing care, nursing education and care for health care personnel.

What is known?

• Receptive art engagement is known to promote health, self-worth, accomplishment and patients’, patients’ near-ones’ and health care professionals’ social engagement.
• Nursing is often described as an art, and health care professionals and patients engaging in art and/or craft making together as fellow human beings has been shown to have a positive effect for both parties and can help diminish power hierarchies.
• Humanistic expressive art therapy is characterized by the work process itself, exposure to a wide range of materials, and the employment of a variety of techniques in therapeutic intervention, used to help individuals explore their hidden feelings in a supportive setting.

What is new?

• Art activities appear to be mainly organized as part of research or general projects, not as systematic health or nursing care interventions, even though most art activity types can be undertaken alone without any special skills and/or significant material investments.
• Health care professionals should be encouraged to use art activities intentionally, to get to know each persons’ narratives, because the meaning of the person’s experiences is a vital part of evidence-based nursing art and person-centered care.
• Whether art activities should be overseen by a nurse or a professional art therapist can be argued: art activity outcomes can be related to nursing goals and nursing outcomes, which could be measured through observations of patients’ art activities and narratives linked to such activities.

1. Introduction

The arts play a significant role in modern health sciences, and they can be used to skillfully interpret emotions, helping one better understand oneself and others [ 1 ]. In health and nursing care, in addition to a focus on the signs and symptoms of a health problem or an illness, there should be a focus on potential (skills or strengths) and satisfaction (areas, actions and activities that bring a satisfying feeling). Seen more broadly, this should include person-centered health and nursing care interventions [ 2 ] and nonpharmacological interventions using art [ 3 ]. The arts and creative expression have been shown to promote health, self-worth, accomplishment, and social engagement [ 3 ]: for patients, patients’ near-ones and health care professionals [ 4 ].

The arts can be defined as music, performance arts (theatre, dance), the visual arts, the literary arts (novel-writing, poetry, other forms of text) and the huge range of applied arts [ 5 ]. The arts can play an integrative role in facilitating lifelong learning, seen as discovering and building new skills and making meaning of experience, because through art one’s past and present thoughts can be combined. Arts engagement can be either receptive (attending concerts, theatre, reading) or active (art making) [ 6 ]. One does not need to be an artist or have any special skills to express oneself through art making; the most important thing is an open attitude to creativity in everyday life. This allows one to give oneself and others a chance to interact with and be touched by art and to vary the pattern of everyday life.

Creative expression is characterized by active participation in the process of bringing something new into existence: the production or performance of art or the creation of an original idea, perspective or process [ 7 ]. Creative activities facilitate self-expression, social interaction, communication, sensory stimulation and emotional relief, in a failure-free environment [ 8 ]. Art therapy can also serve as a link through which individuals can explore past and present experiences, review one’s life, cope with, adjust to, and adapt to age-related changes, be supported during an emotional crisis, or be given care related to physical loss (for example, loss of an organ, memory or mobility) [ 9 ]. Art therapy has especially been applied in oncologic, dementia and mental care. Art therapy must be overseen by an art therapist, and time must be given to verbally processing the feelings arising from the art experience. Conversely, art making need not be overseen by an art therapist. Consequently, it is a practical alternative to art therapy and can still serve as a basis for a person-centered approach to health and nursing care.

2. Background

2.1. the arts and art making in health and nursing care.

In a Health Evidence Network synthesis report from the World Health Organization [ 2 ], researchers found evidence that the arts play a major role in the promotion of good health, the prevention of a range of mental and physical health conditions, and the treatment or management of conditions arising across the life-course. For people with acute conditions, access to the arts in the hospital and/or in the community can help improve experience and outcomes in emergency care and rehabilitation. For people with chronic conditions, access to the arts can support mental health, physical functioning and social and emotional well-being. The arts can even be used to address complex challenges for which there are no current health care solutions. For both those living at home or in an institution, the arts can enrich one’s life. Enjoying the arts by, for example, visiting an art gallery, is not likely to produce lasting effects. However, even for those with severe dementia, enjoyment can be derived from the arts [ 10 ]. Valuable social and emotional support in palliative care and bereavement can also be provided through the arts [ 2 ]. Furthermore, the arts have even been used to investigate brain alterations in artists arising from frontotemporal dementia [ 11 ] and dementia-related delirium and confabulation [ 12 ].

Engagement in creative expression can also lead to improved outcomes for patients [ 3 , 4 , 8 ]. While art making can be perceived as too demanding, art crafting (craft making) can be more easily accepted. Craft making is defined as a form of production that requires some skill, personal insight and practice and encompasses any of the manual arts: for example, weaving, knitting, felting, quilting, embroidery, needlework, basket-weaving, leatherwork, woodwork, copper-tooling or metalcraft. Craft making as purposeful activity has for decades traditionally been used in occupational therapy and/or rehabilitation [ 13 ]. Art and/or craft making have been shown to alleviate symptoms of, for example, depression and fatigue during chemotherapy [ 14 ], stress and anxiety [ 15 ] and can help repair or maintain function in diverse parts of the body or be used to motivate patients to regain function so that they can participate in society again. Health care professionals and patients engaging in art and/or craft making together as fellow human beings has also been shown to have a positive effect for both parties and can help diminish power hierarchies [ 13 ]. Furthermore, the implementation of arts programs in medical education or health care organizations has been found to improve students’ and personnel’s mental health and well-being and reduce stress and burnout [ 4 ].

Storytelling or individual narratives can be considered creative expressions [ 16 ]. Stories illuminate the person, allowing a glimpse of him/herself in decades past. Through stories one not only gains information about the person being cared for but can also facilitate the retrieval of experiences, resources, values and wishes. Reminiscing about one’s own history or home is essential to a person-centered approach, not only in elderly care [ 17 ] but also in situations that presuppose a need for identity reconfiguration and restored self-esteem, such as disruption, divorce or chronic illness. By asking a person to, “Tell me a story about…”, one can uncover information critical to the planning of effective care consistent with the person’s desires and goals [ 18 ]. Used as an alternative to interpreting how a person perceives his/her body image during a health problem or illness, individual narrative in the form of asking a person to draw or tell a story can also be used to help improve self-worth [ 19 ]. Individual narratives in patient education can also take the form of illustrated stories, comic strips [ 12 ] or social theatre [ 20 ].

Creative expression not only enhances a person’s health and well-being, it also enriches communities. The arts and culture have played a crucial role in building cities and towns, fostering unique neighborhoods, and binding communities together [ 4 ]. The arts are also linked to positive effects in building intergenerational bonds [ 21 ]. Engagement with the arts can help address social determinants of health, for example through the development of social cohesion, reduction of loneliness and social isolation and building of individual and group identity. The arts are also effective in reaching people who are either less likely to seek health care or who experience more barriers when seeking it and therefore may have a higher risk of adverse health outcomes [ 4 ].

2.2. Expressive art therapy in health and nursing care

Humanistic expressive art therapy is unlike the analytic or medical model of art therapy, where art is used to diagnose, analyze and “treat” people [ 22 ]. It is characterized by the work process itself, exposure to a wide range of materials, and the employment of a variety of techniques in therapeutic intervention [ 9 ]. Expressive art therapy can help individuals explore their hidden feelings in a supportive setting [ 17 ]. Used to facilitate growth and healing and expressed through various art forms (movement, drawing, painting, sculpting, music, writing, sound, and improvisation) [ 22 ], expressive art therapy can be considered a process of discovering oneself through any art form that emerges from an emotional depth. The creative connection can be considered a spiral of activities, through which layers of inhibition are removed. Through a person-centered approach in expressive art therapy, the therapist’s role – being empathic, open, honest, congruent, and caring – can be emphasized. Expressive art therapy is not used to analyze or solve a problem, nor is it about (striving for) perfection; it is a path to self-expression and a way to release one’s feelings.

Art therapists are qualified health professionals who have undertaken postgraduate studies in art therapy [ 22 ]. They must also register with and be authorized by national supervisory boards, for example, with the National Supervisory Authority for Welfare and Health in Finland ( https://www.valvira.fi/web/en/healthcare/professional_practice_rights ). Without full qualifications and registration, a person cannot act as an art therapist nor practice art therapy; “art therapist” is a protected title [ 22 ]. This is important, because it allows one to discern between a professional art therapist and a “non-professional” who is merely facilitating art making.

In one review [ 23 ], art therapy was found to be effective but not typically more effective than standard therapy. The researchers in that review failed to define the type of art therapy explored or in what/which context(s), but did note that expressive art therapy was excluded. In another review in which the researchers limited inclusion to papers in which art therapy was noted as the specific intervention [ 24 ], researchers found that art therapy can lead to positive treatment outcomes for the populations (all ages) and settings (schools, outpatient clinics, day treatment centers and treatment centers, hospitals and nonclinical settings) included in that review.

2.3. Nursing art and person-centered care

Certain nursing theorists have explored the artistic aspects of nursing. In accordance with Jean Watson, the union between the nurse and the person (individual or community level) is an artistic act and an expression of caregiving, which is unique and personal [ 25 ]. Also other nursing theorists such as Martha Rogers, Faye Glen Abdellah, Ernestine Wiedenbach and Rosemarie Rizzo Parse define nursing as an art [ 26 ]. As a concept, the art of nursing can be defined as, “the intentional creative use of oneself, based upon skill and expertise, to transmit emotion and meaning to another. It is a process that is subjective and requires interpretation, sensitivity, imagination, and active participation” [ 27 ]. Nursing is an aesthetic knowledge (art), where the nurse must make use of his/her internal creative resources to transform others’ experiences. The action, behaviors, attitudes and interactions occurring in a given narrative reveal the transformation, performance and creativity inherent to the narrative [ 28 ]. Aesthetic knowing, seen as the nurse’s perception of the person and the person’s needs, is related to the nurse’s “artful” performance of manual and technical skills. The nurse’s perception of what is significant in the person’s behavior is revealed through the pattern underlying the nurse’s aesthetic knowing. Accordingly, one can maintain that the pattern of aesthetic knowing is focused on particulars rather than universals [ 29 ].

Virginia Henderson argued that, “the nurse’s goal is to assist the patient to become complete, whole, or independent” [ 30 ]. While nurses follow a physician’s therapeutic plan, individualized care is seen and realized through the nurse’s creativity in planning for care. In good, person-centered care, nurses actively seek and foster patient narratives or other creative patient expressions to gain mutual understanding of not only symptoms and problems but also strengths and areas of satisfaction. In person-centered care, the “whole patient”, seen as a psychosocial and existential person, is taken into consideration in health and nursing care. This is shown as respect for the personal narratives that reflect a person’s sense of self, lived experiences and relationships and the recognition of this respect through the safeguarding of a partnership in shared decision-making and in meaningful activities in a personalized environment [ [31] , [32] , [33] ]. In person-centered care, storytelling or narratives (for example, expressed through art making, crafting or art therapy activities) and the art of nursing are interwoven. To foster such care, nurses need not be art therapists and patients need not be artists. However, the nurses should know how art making and expressive art therapy can be used (contexts, types, to whom, by whom, eventual challenges) and what are the outcomes that could be expected.

The aim of this scoping review was to describe the existing knowledge on art making and expressive art therapy in adult health and nursing care. The research questions were:

- How is art making used in adult health and nursing care?
- How is expressive art therapy used in adult health and nursing care?
- What are the outcomes of the different art making and/or expressive art therapy activities in adult health and nursing care?

To describe the existing knowledge [ 34 ] on art and art therapy in adult health and nursing care, a scoping review method was chosen. Scoping reviews constitute a relevant method used to map evidence in complex research areas. Arksey and O’Malley found that while systematic reviews tend to include a focus on a well-defined research question and design, scoping reviews are used to explore a broader research question and include studies that reflect a greater variety of designs. The steps in a scoping review include the identification of research question(s), identification of relevant studies, selection of studies, charting of data, and summarization and reporting of results [ 35 ]. The PRISMA-ScR checklist was used to guide the reporting in this review [ 34 ].

4.1. Search strategy and information sources

As a first step, the identification of research questions occurred. This was followed by the identification of relevant studies and grey literature, which included theoretical papers, statement papers and practice-oriented development reports. Between March 17 and April 10, 2020, searches of the EBSCO, CINAHL, Medline and ERIC databases were conducted. A general Internet search (Google and Google Scholar) was also undertaken to identify grey literature. The MeSH search terms included “art” AND “nursing” as subject terms. As the main topic of interest, the search term (major heading) “art” was set to include: art as art making, expressive art therapy, paintings, creativeness, creativity, nursing as art, museums, photography, music therapy, drawings, and literature. The search term (major heading) “nursing” was set to include all aspects of professional nursing and health care provided by the search engine (f.eg. nursing as art, nursing education, nursing care, nursing practice, caring, nursing as profession, nursing science; psychiatric nursing, oncology nursing, occupational health care, public health care and so on).

4.2. Eligibility criteria

The eligibility criteria included full-text published or to-be-published, peer-reviewed studies, theoretical papers and grey literature with a focus on art making or expressive art therapy with adults (>18 years) in the context of health and nursing care between January 2010 and December 2020. Studies and papers were to be written in English or Finnish, and grey literature had to be either a statement paper or a practice-oriented development report. The time period for this study was chosen to complement already-existing reviews on art therapy: prior to 1999 [ 18 ], 1999–2007 [ 24 ] and a 2008–2013 review of the efficacy of art therapy [ 36 ]. During the search, no other reviews of art making or expressive art therapy in health and nursing care were found.

4.3. Charting and analysis of data

During the screening of potentially relevant papers for inclusion, 117 references were identified through the electronic database searches and general Internet search ( Fig. 1 ). Level one testing included title and abstract screening, during which conference papers without actual research or project results, commercial websites marketing art therapy, papers with a focus on neurological processing during art or art therapy experiences (considered irrelevant, n = 11) and duplicates ( n = 33) were excluded. Relevant papers were then retained for full-text review in level two testing and reviewed by the first author (HVR). In this phase, papers without a free full-text version ( n = 31) were excluded due to economic reasons.

Flow diagram of paper selection process.

The data extracted from each paper ( n = 42) included: type of art making or expressive art therapy activity, context, research details (sample size and characteristics, intervention, method(s) of data collection) and outcomes and/or conclusions (theoretical papers). Following data charting and extraction, the data were summarized to answer the research questions [ 35 , 37 ].

5.1. Art making in health and nursing care

Art making was described in 27 papers ( Table 1 ), in contexts ranging from primary health care for community members [ [38] , [39] , [40] , [41] , [42] , [43] , [44] , [45] ] to a penal institution [ 46 ]. The professional responsible for the art making was not always explicitly described, nor the involvement/role of researcher(s). Most participants were over 65 years of age. In seven papers, the art making activity was conducted in a group. In some papers, the persons involved in the art making could not speak [ 47 , 48 ]. In one paper, patients’ near-ones were involved in art making [ 49 ] and in another paper, a member of the professional team made the art, emanating from the patient’s narrative [ 50 ]. There were no papers in which health care or nursing professionals were solely engaged in art making.

Table 1

Type of art making, context, research details and outcomes/conclusions, in health and nursing care between 2010 and 2020 (in alphabetic order, by author name; n = 27 papers).

The type of art making varied: drawing, painting, coloring, mosaic, sculpture, ballet, drama or furniture making ( Table 1 ). In some papers, art making was considered a narrative (for example, [ 47 , [50] , [51] , [52] , [53] ]), while in other papers (for example, [ 39 , 46 , 49 ]) a narrative was produced as a complement to art making. In most papers, participants themselves chose the type of art making, but in some papers a pre-delineated art making scheme was seen. In some papers, the art making context and type of health problem were seen to influence the choice of art making materials [ 48 , [54] , [55] , [56] ].

Art making was described either as part of preventive health care on the individual level (for example, [ 42 ]) or group level (for example, 38); or as a means for therapeutic nursing care. Art making was linked to the co-creation of new health indicators and community health [ 41 ], alleviating anxiety [ 38 ], and the improvement of emotional well-being [ 44 , 45 ], mental health [ 39 , 40 , 42 ] and personal growth [ 39 , 44 ].

In most papers, art making was described as a means for therapeutic nursing care, seen in various contexts and settings: specialized hospital mental care [ 43 ], pain care [ 57 ], oncologic care [ [58] , [59] , [60] ], neurologic care [ 61 ] rehabilitation [ 50 , 52 , 53 ], long-term elderly care (for example, [ 47 , 51 , 55 , 56 , 62 ]) and dementia care (for example, [ 48 , 49 , 63 ]). Art making was used as an assistive means in diagnosing Parkinson’s disease retroactively [ 64 ], a somatoform-functional pain disorder [ 57 ] and melanoma [ 59 ]. Within nursing care, art making activities were linked to outcomes ( Table 2 ) such as acknowledgement of own unique experiences [ 52 , 56 ] or strengths [ 51 ], better communication of own experiences and strengths with professionals [ 50 ], heightened self-esteem [ 46 , 62 ], involvement in activity [ 53 , 55 ], less wandering for a person with dementia [ 48 ], and improvements in human connectivity [ 39 ] and social inclusion [ 49 , 56 ]. Also, enhancement of own cognitive capacities [ 49 , 61 ], perceived lower anxiety [ 38 ], less physiologic stress [ 58 ], more positive emotions [ 60 ], improved mental well-being [ 43 ] and overall quality of life [ 49 , 50 ] were seen.

Table 2

Outcomes of art making activities.

Information on art making activities in relation to preferred outcomes in the papers was dependent on research design and methodological rigor. Most papers were cross-sectional, did not include a control group, and had rather small sample sizes. The interventions, if described, were seen to vary in length from 20 min to 20 weeks and were not always fully described. Nevertheless, there were three randomized controlled studies and three longitudinal studies, and in most studies validated instruments were used during data collection, with or without qualitative methods.

5.2. Expressive art therapy in health and nursing care

Expressive art therapy was described in 15 papers ( Table 3 ), in contexts ranging from community centers [ [65] , [66] , [67] , [68] ], projects for the homeless [ 69 ] and immigrants [ 68 ] to more clinical contexts: cancer care [ 70 , 71 ], dementia care [ 72 , 73 ], psychiatric care [ 74 , 75 ] and hospice care [ 76 , 77 ]. Professional art therapists were responsible for the art therapy sessions, and researchers were seen to be involved data collectors. Most participants were elderly, usually over 70 years. In 11 papers, the expressive art therapy activities were organized in groups, despite the possible vulnerability of participants in certain contexts due to illness. In one paper, the person involved could not speak [ 72 ]. There were no papers in which the patients’ near-ones or health and nursing care professionals were involved in expressive art therapy.

Table 3

Type of expressive art therapy activity, research details and outcomes/conclusions, in health and nursing care between 2010 and 2020 (in alphabetic order, by author name; n = 15 papers).

The type of expressive art therapy activity varied greatly: among others, music, guided imagery, coloring, sculpture, famous painting appreciation, quilting ( Table 3 ). In all papers, the various activities were combined in accordance with how expressive art therapy was defined. For example, in some papers, narratives were considered an implicit part of the expressive art therapy process [ 65 , 68 , 69 , 73 , 74 ] while in other papers a narrative was produced as a complement to art making . In some papers, participants could choose between art therapy activities according to own preferences (for example, 74) but in others a pre-delineated therapy program (for example, 78) or art making scheme was seen.

Expressive art therapy activities were linked to outcomes ( Table 4 ) such as improved cognitive skills [ 65 , 66 , 68 ], self-esteem [ 74 , 78 ], connection with others such as family members and staff [ 67 , 77 , 78 ], self-expression [ 73 , 77 , 78 ], self-empowerment [ 76 ], quality of life [ 71 , 72 , 77 ], and self-efficacy [ 69 ], and decrease in depression [ 70 , 74 , 75 , 79 ], anxiety [ 70 , 75 , 78 ] and psychosocial stress [ 71 ].

Table 4

Outcomes of expressive art therapy activities.

Note: ∗Drawing an autobiographical timeline, quilting one’s story, drawing a picture of oneself.

Information on expressive art therapy activities in relation to preferred outcomes in the papers was dependent on research design and methodological rigor. There were five randomized controlled studies and one controlled intervention study, but also three case illustrations and some project descriptions. The interventions were seen to vary in length from one session to 20 weeks, and the sample sizes were small. In about half of the papers, validated instruments were used during data collection. However, there were also several papers in which observations or field notes were used as the main data collection method, and these did not include systematic explanations of how the data were analyzed.

5.3. Outcomes of art making or expressive art therapy activities in health and nursing care

While the outcomes linked to art making and expressive art therapy activities in adult health and nursing care are briefly described in sections 5.1 and 5.2 above, a synthesis of the stated relationships between the different types of activities and outcomes also occurred. The activities are listed in order from passive to more active engagement ( Table 2 , Table 4 ).

Little difference was seen between the activities included in art making and expressive art therapy activities. With few exceptions, such as singing, crafting, making videos and drama (art making) and guided imagery and viewing of artworks (expressive art therapy), all other activities were the same.

The outcomes of art making activities ( Table 2 ) for individuals were linked to, for example, acknowledgement of own unique experiences and own strengths, personal growth, emotional well-being, heightened self-esteem and better communication of own experiences and strengths with professionals. The outcomes of art making activities in group were linked to the development of cognitive capacities (possibly), mental well-being, social inclusion and quality of life.

As seen in 11 out of 15 papers, expressive art therapy activities primarily took place in groups. The outcomes of expressive art therapy activities in group ( Table 4 ) were linked to a decrease in certain symptoms such as psychosocial stress, anxiety or depression; or improved self-esteem, self-expression, self-empowerment and connection with others.

Outcomes linked to art making appear to encompass prevention, while outcomes linked to expressive art therapy appear to encompass the care and cure of already existing signs of health problems. Nonetheless, very similar goals, methods and outcomes for both methods were seen. Therefore, it is not relevant to state any relationships between certain health problems and the specific outcomes of art activities.

6. Discussion and conclusions

The aim of this scoping review was to describe the existing knowledge on art making and expressive art therapy in adult health and nursing care. From the 42 studies and other papers included here, published between 2010 and 2020, one sees that both art making and expressive art therapy are used on the community level in preventive health care and rehabilitation, as well as in hospitals and other care institutions in specialized nursing care and cure. In other words, the art activities were offered for both healthy individuals as part of community projects and for chronically or terminally ill residents, with activities for such participants occurring outside of the home setting (see Ref. [ 10 ]) and no acute patients being seen (see Ref. [ 2 ]). While this is understandable, because of the perceived challenges associated with organizing art activities in a home setting and the nature of acute health problems, art activities can nonetheless easily be organized in such a setting. Individuals can involve themselves in crafting or other art making activities in the home using independent virtual or digital devices. Researchers have shown that acute patients benefit from receptive art engagement in the form of paintings or music (see Ref. [ 4 ]), even if they are not willing or actively able to make art during an acute health problem. The art activities seen here were mainly organized as part of research or general projects, not as systematic health or nursing care interventions, even though most art activity types can be undertaken alone without any special skills and/or significant material investments. However, the context of art making and type of health problem influence the choice of art making type and materials [ 48 , [54] , [55] , [56] ]. For example, patients with tendency to eat whatever they get into their hands (certain psychiatric conditions, deep dementia) or with risk to other kind of self-harm or aggression such as wounding cannot work with scissors or participate into crafting activities such as quilting, embroidery, needlework, leatherwork, woodwork, copper-tooling or metalcraft – at least not in group and without supervision.

Activation appeared to be one objective underlying the implementation of art activities. Usually organized in a group, art activities were seen to improve acknowledgement of own experiences, strengths and self-esteem; lead to better communication of own experiences and strengths with professionals; and improve perception of well-being or health on the psychological, physiological and social levels and quality of life. Another underlying objective appeared to the facilitation of the coping with and adapting to age-related transitions such as retirement, decrease of mobility, cognitive decline or move from own home to a nursing home. This was seen as support during an emotional crisis such as immigration, incarceration, homelessness or hospice care; facilitating coping with psychological and physical symptoms; or support during or after a health crisis such as depression, brain injury, cancer, chronic pain, open heart or hip replacement surgery. These results are in accordance with earlier research results (see Ref. [ 3 , 4 , 8 , 18 ]) and the definition of expressive art therapy (see Ref. [ 9 ]). Nursing goals and outcomes can be related to art activity outcomes, measured through observations of patients’ art activities and narratives linked to such activities.

Art activities were linked not only to acknowledging and building new strengths and skills, making meaning of experiences, and personal growth but also the establishment of clinical diagnosis, symptom alleviation, and communication, whereby collaboration with near ones and health care professionals was fostered. Art activities should become an essential part of health and nursing care, because they were seen to be beneficial in nearly every context: prevention, rehabilitation, care, cure and palliation. They were furthermore seen to promote person-centeredness, whether organized for individuals or in group.

Health care professionals should be encouraged to use art activities intentionally to get to know each person and his/her experiences, because the meaning of the person’s experiences is a vital part of evidence-based nursing art and person-centered care (see 26, 27, 28, 30). To achieve mutual understanding of both perceived symptoms, problems, needs, strengths and areas of satisfaction, nurses should encourage patients’ narratives and/or other creative expressions (see 3). Art making and/or expressive art therapy can also be used to address complex challenges (see 2), such as pandemics. For example, what are individuals, groups, nurses, patients, and near-ones experiencing during this most recent COVID19 pandemic? How could nursing education, health care organization and management be further developed, emanating from these experiences? In the data seen here, most participants were adults, aged 65 years or older. In most papers, even if the type of health problem has an impact on choice of safe art making materials, the participants themselves chose the preferred art activity, which is a motivating and truly person-centered act [ 2 , 15 , 22 , [31] , [32] , [33] ]. Still, patients’ near-ones were involved in art making in only one paper [ 49 ], and a member of the professional team made art emanating from the patient’s narrative in only one paper [ 50 ]. No papers describing collaborative patient-professional art making or health care professional art making were seen (see 4, 13). Also, the professional responsible for the art making was not always explicitly described, nor the involvement/role of researcher/s.

These results are partly contrary to recommendations on the use of art in health care. Engagement in art activities is linked to the engagement of patients’ near-ones in person-centered care and the idea of sustainable methods whereby to promote the well-being of healthcare professionals; among other things, art activities have been shown to improve the mental health and well-being of personnel and reduce stress and burnout [ 4 ]. There may be a lack of information about the importance of and possibility to include patients’ near-ones and health care professionals in art activities. Through more knowledge and understanding of the types and outcomes of art activities, health care personnel can inform patients, patients’ near-ones and members of interprofessional teams about the importance of active art making and make what is seemingly currently “extraordinary” a more ordinary, implicit part of care. How health care personnel can facilitate art making should be included in health care professional curricula or offered as further education. In this data there was no evidence of such; neither in health care personnel education - nor patient education (see 12, 20).

If health care personnel do not have time for art activities as part of their professional interventions, professional art therapists could be employed. However, if there is no need for professional therapy , the use of professional therapists can be considered an unnecessary barrier between the nurse and patient. Giving nurses the opportunity to incorporate art activities into their evidence-based, professional nursing interventions would promote an active nursing role and a creative, person-centered way of working. Moreover, a variety of artists, writing coaches or actors could be included not only in interprofessional health care and nursing teams but also in care for health care personnel, which could help facilitate sustainable creativity.

Further randomized controlled trials in which the use of art making or expressive art therapy are investigated in relation to their effects on the nurse-patient relationship, the patient-near-one relationship, person-centeredness, clinical and other outcomes are needed. This can help ensure that art activities and narratives emerging from such activities become an effective means for the realization of person-centered preventive health care, nursing care and cure, nursing education and sustainable care for health care personnel. Also, health care professionals’ knowledge of, skills and attitudes toward art activities should be investigated, alongside measurement of art activity outcomes over a longer period of time and broader samples, in which participant life situation, education, cognitive and motoric capacities are explored. Lastly, more male participants and participants from different ethnic backgrounds are needed.

This review has some limitations. The data search was conducted by one author, and there is no registered review protocol, only manual documentation of the search process. The search yielded in 117 papers of which 31 were not available in full- text without economic investment. However, all the abstracts were read through properly by all authors and we are convinced that if we would have purchased those papers the main results of this scoping review would not have altered. The data charting and extraction were conducted by the entire research group. Some data in the papers reviewed were not always explicitly reported: the art making or expressive art therapy intervention, health care professionals’ and/or researchers’ role, the data analysis process. Also, sample sizes were smallish and the availability of follow-up data on the long-term effects of art activities was limited.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Heli Vaartio-Rajalin : Conceptualization, Methodology, Data Curation, Visualization, Formal Analysis, Writing - Original Draft, Supervision. Regina Santamäki-Fischer : Conceptualization, Data Curation, Validation, Writing - Review & Editing. Pamela Jokisalo : Data Curation, Validation, Writing - Review & Editing. Lisbeth Fagerström : Validation, Writing - Review & Editing.

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Peer review under responsibility of Chinese Nursing Association.

Appendix A Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnss.2020.09.011 .

Appendix A. Supplementary data

The following is the Supplementary data to this article:

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The Art of Healing: The effects and importance of art in hospitals and clinical settings

Olivia Adamaitis , Sotheby's Institute of Art

Date of Award

Document type.

Thesis - Restricted Access (SIA Only)

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Art Business

First Advisor

Judith Prowda

Second Advisor

Elizabeth Pergam

This paper discusses the history of the inclusion of art in hospitals and clinical settings, and how the presence and effectiveness of art has been vital to one’s healing journey from illness. Often, art is used as wall-fillers within healthcare facilities, and irregularly updated or cared for. This essay will provide imagery and descriptions of successful art that has been chosen or commissioned in hospital spaces, and we will dive into multiple case studies and research done that prove the positive effects art has on patient’s well-being. Additionally, the most frequent types of art found in these facilities will be analyzed, and what art works best will be examined. The opinions and experiences of healthcare workers are used to provide a look into the lives of individuals who spend endless hours surrounded by art, or the lack thereof. Additionally, interviews with an experienced, successful hospital curator and a world-renown clinical art department will be used to provide readers with a better understanding of what occurs behind the scenes of hospital’s art collections. Next, the paper considers the challenges that come with having art in hospitals, such as the preconceived notions that art is unimportant and funding should be invested elsewhere. Finally, we will take a close look into a museum and hospital collaboration that utilizes art to teach, inspire, and distract.

Recommended Citation

Adamaitis, Olivia, "The Art of Healing: The effects and importance of art in hospitals and clinical settings" (2020). MA Theses . 79. https://digitalcommons.sia.edu/stu_theses/79

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The Haiti That Still Dreams

By Edwidge Danticat

A person watching a street soccer game from behind a barricade.

I often receive condolence-type calls, e-mails, and texts about Haiti. Many of these messages are in response to the increasingly dire news in the press, some of which echoes what many of us in the global Haitian diaspora hear from our family and friends. More than fifteen hundred Haitians were killed during the first three months of this year, according to a recent United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights report, which described the country’s situation as “ cataclysmic .” Women and girls are routinely subjected to sexual violence. Access to food, water, education, and health care is becoming more limited, with more than four million Haitians, around a third of the population, living with food insecurity, and 1.4 million near starvation. Armed criminal groups have taken over entire neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas, carrying out mass prison breaks and attacks on the city’s airport, seaport, government buildings, police stations, schools, churches, hospitals, pharmacies, and banks, turning the capital into an “ open air prison .”

Even those who know the country’s long and complex history will ask, “Why can’t Haiti catch a break?” We then revisit some abridged version of that history. In 1804, after a twelve-year revolution against French colonial rule, Haiti won its independence, which the United States and several European powers failed to recognize for decades. The world’s first Black republic was then forced to spend sixty years paying a hundred-and-fifty-million francs (now worth close to thirty billion dollars) indemnity to France . Americans invaded and then occupied Haiti for nineteen years at the beginning of the twentieth century. The country endured twenty-nine years of murderous dictatorship under François Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, until 1986. In 1991, a few months after Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, took office, he was overthrown in a coup staged by a military whose members had been trained in the U.S. Aristide was elected again, then overthrown again, in 2004, in part owing to an armed rebellion led by Guy Philippe, who was later arrested by the U.S. government for money laundering related to drug trafficking. Last November, six years into his nine-year prison sentence, Philippe was deported by the U.S. to Haiti. He immediately aligned himself with armed groups and has now put himself forward as a Presidential candidate.

In 2010, the country was devastated by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake, which killed more than two hundred thousand people. Soon after, United Nations “peacekeepers” dumped feces in Haiti’s longest river, causing a cholera epidemic that killed more than ten thousand people and infected close to a million. For the past thirteen years, Haiti has been decimated by its ruling party, Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (P.H.T.K.), which rose to power after a highly contested election in 2011. In that election, the U.S.—then represented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and the Organization of American States helped the candidate who finished in third place, Michel Martelly, claim the top spot. Bankrolled by kidnapping, drug trafficking, business élites, and politicians, armed groups have multiplied under P.H.T.K, committing massacres that have been labelled crimes against humanity. In 2021, a marginally elected President, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in his bedroom , a crime for which many of those closest to him, including his wife, have been named as either accomplices or suspects.

The unasked question remains, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in “ The Souls of Black Folk ,” “How does it feel to be a problem?”

I deeply honor Haiti’s spirit of resistance and long history of struggle, but I must admit that sometimes the answer to that question is that it hurts. Sometimes it hurts a lot, even when one is aware of the causes, including the fact that the weapons that have allowed gangs to take over the capital continue to flow freely from Miami and the Dominican Republic, despite a U.N. embargo. Internally, the poorest Haitians have been constantly thwarted by an unequal and stratified society, which labels rural people moun andeyò (outside people), and which is suffused with greedy and corrupt politicians and oligarchs who scorn the masses from whose tribulations they extract their wealth.

Recently, at a loved one’s funeral, in Michigan, the spectre of other Haitian deaths was once again on the minds of my extended family members. Everywhere we gather, Haiti is with us, as WhatsApp messages continuously stream in from those who chose to stay in Haiti and can’t leave because the main airport is closed, and others who have no other home. In Michigan, during chats between wake, funeral, and repast, elders brought up those who can’t get basic health care, much less a proper burial or any of the rituals that are among our most sacred obligations. “Not even a white sheet over those bodies on the street,” my mother-in-law, who is eighty-nine, said, after receiving yet another image of incinerated corpses in Port-au-Prince. At least after the 2010 earthquake, sheets were respectfully placed on the bodies pulled from the rubble. Back then, she said, the armed young men seemed to have some reverence for life and some fear of death.

Lately, some of our family gatherings are incantations of grief. But they can also turn into storytelling sessions of a different kind. They are opportunities for our elders to share something about Haiti beyond what our young ones, like everyone else, see on the news. The headlines bleed into their lives, too, as do the recycled tropes that paint us as ungovernable, failures, thugs, and even cannibals. As with the prayers that we recite over the dead, words still have power, the elders whisper. We must not keep repeating the worst, they say, and in their voices I hear an extra layer of distress. They fear that they may never see Haiti again. They fear that those in the next generation, some of whom have never been to Haiti, will let Haiti slip away, as though the country they see in the media—the trash-strewn streets and the barricades made from the shells of burnt cars, the young men brandishing weapons of war and the regular citizens using machetes to defend themselves—were part of some horror film that they can easily turn off. The elders remind us that we have been removed, at least physically, from all of this by only a single generation, if not less.

We are still human beings, the elders insist—“ Se moun nou ye .” We are still wozo , like that irrepressible reed that grows all over Haiti. For a brief moment, I think someone might break into the Haitian national anthem or sing a few bars of the folk song “ Ayiti Cheri .” (“Beloved Haiti, I had to leave you to understand.”) Instead, they hum the music that the wozo has inspired : “ Nou se wozo / Menm si nou pliye, nou pap kase. ” Even if we bend, we will not break.

Except we are breaking. “It pains me to see people living in constant fear,” the Port-au-Prince-based novelist and poet Évelyne Trouillot recently wrote to me in an e-mail. “I dream of a country where children are not afraid to dream.” Internationally, U.S. deportations continue , Navy ships are ready to be deployed to intercept migrant boats, and Haitian asylum seekers could once again end up imprisoned on Guantánamo, as they did in the early nineteen-nineties. In conversations, whether with strangers or with younger family members, someone inevitably asks, “Is there any hope?”

I have hope, I say, because I grew up with elders, both in Haiti and here in the U.S., who often told us, “ Depi gen souf gen espwa ”—as long as there’s breath, there’s hope. I have hope, too, because the majority of Haitians are under twenty-five years old, as are many members of our family. Besides, how can we give in to despair with eleven million people’s lives in the balance? Better yet, how can we reignite that communal grit and resolve that inspired us to defeat the world’s greatest armies and then pin to our flag the motto “ L’union fait la force ”? Unity is strength.

The elders also remind us that Haiti is not just Port-au-Prince. As more and more of the capital’s residents are forced to return to homesteads and ancestral villages, the moun andeyò have much to teach other Haitians. “Historically, the moun andeyò have always been the preserver of Haiti’s cultural and traditional ethos,” Vivaldi Jean-Marie, a professor of African American and African-diaspora studies at Columbia University, told me. Rural Haitians, who have lived for generations without the support of the state, have had no choice but to rely on one another in close and extended family structures called lakou . “This shared awareness—I am because we are—will prevail beyond this difficult chapter in Haitian history,” Jean-Marie said.

Finally, I have hope because in Haiti, as the American writer and art collector Selden Rodman has written, “ art is joy .” This remains true even as some of the country’s most treasured cultural institutions, including the National School of the Arts and the National Library, have been ransacked. In the summer of 2023, Carrefour Feuilles, a district in Port-au-Prince that many writers, visual artists, and musicians call home, was attacked by armed criminal groups. The onslaught led to a petition that collected close to five thousand signatures. It read in part, “How many more hundreds of our women and children must be raped, executed, burned before the public authorities do everything possible to put an end to the plague of gangs and their sponsors?”

A few days later, the homes of two of the signatories, the multimedia artist Lionel St. Eloi and the writer Gary Victor, were taken over by a gang. The last time I saw St. Eloi was in 2019, in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince’s Centre d’Art, where he had a series of metal birds on display, their bejewelled bodies and beaks pointing toward the sky. Allenby Augustin, the Centre d’Art’s executive director, recently described how some artists, afraid of having to suddenly flee their homes and leave their work behind, bring their pieces to the center or keep them in friends’ homes in different parts of the city. Others add the stray bullets that land inside their studios— bal pèdi or bal mawon —to their canvasses.

St. Eloi, the patriarch of a family of artists, had lived in Carrefour Feuilles since the seventies, working with young people there. “The youth who were neglected or who could not afford to go to school were taken in by our family,” one of St. Eloi’s sons, the musician Duckyns (Zikiki) St. Eloi, told me. “We taught them to paint, to play guitar, and to play the drums. Now they are hired to run errands for gangsters who put guns in their hands.” In spite of what has happened, he still believes that art can turn some things around. He recently sent me a picture of a work by his younger brother Anthony—an image depicting gang members wearing brightly colored balaclavas and holding pencils, a book, a paint palette, a camera, and a musical instrument. “If there are gangs, we’d be better off with art gangs,” Zikiki said. “Gangs that paint, make music, recite poetry. Art is how we bring our best face to the world. Art is how we dream.” ♦

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Navel Gazing

John dickerson’s notebooks: the power of four numbers.

Noticing longer, gray lockboxes, a soul-crushing teacher, Georgia O’Keeffe and more are explored in this week’s audio essay from John Dickerson.

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Episode Notes

In this week’s essay, John discusses the art of attention and how to develop the skill of slow-looking.

Notebook Entries:

Notebook 75, page 8. September 2021

Notebook 1, page 54. June 1990

- Magna carta 1215 at Salisbury

- Girls skipping

- The Haunch of Venison

- Chris

References:

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

A Little History of the World by E.H Gombrich

Artist Jeff Koons

“ The Art of Divination: D.H. Lawrence on the Power of Pure Attention ” by Maria Popova for The Marginalian

“ Gabfest Reads: A Woman’s Life in Museum Wall Labels ” for Political Gabfest

One Woman Show by Christine Coulson

“ Grammy-winning artist Jason Isbell talks about the craft of songwriting and his latest music ” for CBS News

A Journey Around My Room by Xavier De Maistre

“ Just think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind ” by Timothy Wilson, et.al for Science

“ Our Rodent Selfies, Ourselves ” by Emily Anthes for the New York Times

One Man’s Meat by E.B. White

Podcast production by Cheyna Roth.

Email us at [email protected]

Want to listen to Navel Gazing uninterrupted? Subscribe to Slate Plus to immediately unlock ad-free listening to Navel Gazing and all your other favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Or, visit slate.com/navelgazingplus to get access wherever you listen.

About the Show

Political Gabfest host John Dickerson has been a journalist for more than three decades, reporting about presidential campaigns, political scandals, and the evolving state of our democracy. Along the way, he’s also been recording his observations in notebooks he has carried in his back pocket. He has captured his thoughts about life, parenthood, death, friendship, writing, God, to-do lists, and more. On the Navel Gazing podcast, John Dickerson invites you to join him in figuring out what these 30 years of notebooks mean: sorting out what makes a life—or a day in a life—noteworthy.

John Dickerson is host of CBS News Prime Time With John Dickerson , co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest, host of the Whistlestop podcast, and author of The Hardest Job in the World .

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The Teen Trend of Sexual Choking

More from our inbox:, emergency abortions and the supreme court, our father, who led columbia, would be saddened today, hiring discrimination, trump’s own ‘fake news’.

A pile of bed linens on a night stand next to a bed.

To the Editor:

Re “ Why We Need to Talk About Teen Sex ,” by Peggy Orenstein (Opinion guest essay, April 14):

As a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst who has worked for decades with teens and college-age students, I’m disturbed but not surprised by the trend of choking during sex.

Choking is obviously very dangerous, and unfortunately, social media has made this once uncommon practice more mainstream.

Education is the key with both our youth and parents. Yes, sexual strangulation needs to be part of ongoing conversations about safe sex practices. There clearly needs to be more accountability about this behavior.

There is a line, a boundary, where rough sex, whether it’s consensual or not, crosses into danger, causing devastating long-term effects for participants.

Arden Greenspan Goldberg San Diego

While reading this essay, I was reminded of how feminist writers and activists waved warning flags about the pernicious effects of pornography on women back in the 1970s and ’80s. They published books and essays on the subject, marched in demonstrations and spoke out in the media. They were continually derided as prudes and censors.

Decades later, with violent porn pervasive online and a generation of young women subjected to the sadistic sexual violence normalized by porn, it turns out those prudes and censors were actually Cassandras.

I thank Peggy Orenstein and the researchers in this story for bringing new attention to the issue.

J. Jamakaya Milwaukee

I taught a course on human sexuality to college students during the AIDS epidemic. When I heard about sexual strangulation, I considered briefly: Should I link this practice to arousal and orgasm when speaking to these high-risk young people? I knew that many would then experiment. I chose not to mention it, but I taught them, through role play, how to verbally refuse inappropriate sexual invitations.

Today, I hope instructors in my position will discuss with their students sexual strangulation with a potential partner and help them practice responding to sexual pressure.

Pornography makes partners look willing. Evolution favored a strong sex drive. The planet doesn’t need it anymore.

Elizabeth Powell St. Louis The writer is the author of “Talking Back to Sexual Pressure.”

Re “ 5 Takeaways From the Supreme Court Arguments on Idaho’s Abortion Ban ” (nytimes.com, April 24):

Reading about the hearing at the Supreme Court, I was taken aback at the careful attention some justices paid to ensuring that physicians whose conscience precludes them from performing abortions are excused from violating their beliefs. But some doctors are being forced to violate their conscience by being prevented from performing an abortion on patients whose precarious condition might decline precipitously without such a procedure.

Being forced to refuse medically indicated aid, knowing that the dire consequences violate the Hippocratic oath to do no harm, is an affront to their consciences, which must be considered with the same attention.

Susan Swartz Philadelphia

Re “ On Emergency Abortion Access, Justices Seem Sharply Divided ” (nytimes.com, April 24):

You write that since the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, uncertainty about the parameters for legal abortion in several states has led to complaints about doctors being forced to “think like lawyers.”

I am equally concerned that complex medical decisions are being made by nine lawyers being forced to think like doctors.

Jon D. Morrow New York The writer is an obstetrician-gynecologist.

Our father, Michael I. Sovern , played a leading role in resolving Columbia’s 1968 protests. He served as Columbia’s only Jewish president, from 1980 to 1993, and helped negotiate a peaceful end to weeks of anti-apartheid demonstrations.

We cannot know what our father, who died in 2020, would do if he were still president, but we have no doubt he would be deeply saddened by what is happening at the university that he loved and served for more than 60 years.

We believe that he would not want politicians and outsiders not affiliated with Columbia to exploit sincere student protest for their own gains, and, as in the 1980s, he would want protesters to ensure that they do not keep the university from providing the excellent education from which he and so many others benefited.

Finally, we know he would agree that anyone expressing opposition to the Israeli government or Hamas should not make Jewish or Palestinian students feel attacked or unsafe.

Jeff Sovern Elizabeth Sovern Doug Sovern Julie Sovern

Re “ Study Uses Fake Résumés to Measure Bias in Hiring ” (The Upshot, April 15):

The study on hiring discrimination in large U.S. companies, as reported in your story, highlights the importance of social capital in landing a job, especially for people of color.

The study found that even with equivalent qualifications, applicants with Black-sounding names were contacted by employers nearly 10 percent less often than those with white-sounding names.

In a world where such discriminatory hiring practices persist, the ability to build social capital — the relationships and networks that help open doors and advance someone in their career and life pursuits — is paramount.

Research shows that social capital — and in particular, cross-class relationships — is the greatest predictor of economic mobility. Educational institutions, from high schools to community colleges and trade schools, should prioritize helping students build social capital.

By teaching them how to build relationships, facilitating connections with industry professionals, creating mentorship programs that pair students with successful alumni, and, most important, teaching students how to make meaningful requests of those alumni, we can put more people on the path to successful careers.

Because opportunity should hinge on merit, not a name.

Nitzan Pelman Berkeley, Calif. The writer is C.E.O. of Climb Hire Labs, a national nonprofit teaching students and job seekers the art of building social capital.

Re “ Witness Recalls Burying Stories to Shield Trump ” (front page, April 24):

Finally, we have a rather compelling example of that “fake news” that Donald Trump has been ranting about for years.

He not only sought to bury damaging stories. It turns out that he and his fixer, Michael Cohen, working closely with David Pecker, the publisher of The National Enquirer, also concocted and released wholly untrue stories about his political opponents (for example, “Donald Trump Blasts Ted Cruz’s Dad for Photo With J.F.K. Assassin”). So says Mr. Pecker, under oath, in a Manhattan courtroom.

James P. Pehl Marlborough, Mass.

IMAGES

What is the Healing Power of Art?
Linda Ronstadt Quote: “Art is for healing ourselves, and everybody
Arts As Healing
Top 57 Art Is Healing Quotes & Sayings
Art as a Healing Practice info Video
Top 57 Art Is Healing Quotes & Sayings

COMMENTS

Essay: Art is more than beauty; it can help us heal
The role of art and creativity in helping us to heal is centuries old. Creation is a natural counterbalance in our lives, giving us ballast and hope — purpose and meaning — in a world that can ...
The Healing Power of Art
Jackie Armstrong. Sep 17, 2021. Art can heal. Last year CultuRunners kicked off the Healing Arts initiative as part of the World Health Organization's Solidarity Series of Events, and MoMA launched Artful Practices for Well-Being, which integrated trauma awareness into its programming, acknowledging individual and collective traumas, many of ...
The Connection Between Art, Healing, and Public Health: A Review of
We reviewed research in the area of art and healing in an effort to determine the creative therapies most often employed. Four primary therapies emerged: music engagement, visual arts therapy, movement-based creative expression, and expressive writing. ... Participants who engaged in emotional writing rated their essays as more personal ...
Art as a Path to Emotion
Art, one's own or another's, is emotionally and psychologically healing. Our recent posts have addressed the importance of getting in touch with one's feelings and communicating these to ...
The Healing Power Of Art
The Healing Power Of Art. Posted on May 29, 2018 by Henry Ford Health Staff. Whether you toil over an oil canvas or doodle mindlessly on a page, research suggests the act of creating art has powerful healing properties. In a study published in the journal Art Therapy, three-quarters of participants experienced lower levels of the stress hormone ...
The Art of Healing
The Art of Healing. By Kathleen Masterson and Suzanne Leigh. The idea of art as medicine dates back to antiquity, but recently the concept is drawing increasing interest from the medical and science communities. Seated at a table dotted with paintbrushes, pencils and curios, Hideka Suzuki is creating an abstract on a small canvas.
The Culture of Healing: Louise Glück on Art's Restorative Power
This short essay titled The Culture of Healing, condemns current trends of pathological optimism, as well as the tendency towards 'the pornography of scars,' and the assumption that the best art is inextricably tied to suffering. What art can do for the artist, she argues, is provide a buffer or a respite from pain in order to give form to ...
The Healing Power of Art From Ancient Times to now
Asklepios was the Greek God of medicine. He was the patron God and reputed ancestor of the Asklepiades, an ancient guild of doctors. It was after their traditions that the beatific halls of the Athenian hospitals of the fifth century were named and designed. It was believed the calming aesthetic was crucial to a sense of calmness and hence the ...
How Art Helps Us Think About Health
Art can shape a vision of a different world. The current aesthetic of health tends to focus on youth and fitness, but the pursuit of health increasingly concerns later stages in life. Art can ...
The Healing Power of the Artful Essay
The Healing Power of the Artful Essay View Course ... That can be an important dimension of writing as a healing art, but there are other therapeutic uses of writing, too. This week, we'll look at some of the ways that writing can help us to de-stress and redirect our focus. We'll also consider how writing about the struggles we have faced ...
How Art Heals: 5 Ways That Art Makes Everything Better
Here are just a few of the many ways that art heals: 1. Art Lowers Anxiety. Just looking at art can be healing. For centuries, many cultures have used the mandala form as a tool for contemplation ...
Art Therapy at Museums: How Institutions Heal Their Audiences
The Museum of Modern Art pioneered the exploration of art's healing power, ... to the topic of art as therapy, featuring essays by specialists in psychiatry, psychology, and art education. From ...
Does Art Heal?
In another study, published in the February 2006 issue of the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, cancer patients who participated in a visual art session reported feeling less pain, tiredness, drowsiness, and breathlessness afterwards. Indeed, scientists have documented health benefits from exposure to art at all stages of life.
The Healing Power of the Artful Essay
The Healing Power of the Artful Essay View Course Creating images and scenes and shaping our stories— transforming experience into art—can also transform our selves. Studies of expressive arts therapy show that the act of writing can be profoundly therapeutic. They also show many intersections between techniques that put the "creative ...
Healing Path and Impact of Healer's Art
Leisure Activities and Their Impact on a Patient's Recovery. In the article called Healing in Spaces, Cheryl Dellasega touched on her experiences as a nurse in "The Crescent" and hosting an orthopedic art exhibit. This opportunity was very important for her because the waiting room and the Pain Clinic looked very grim and upsetting.
Psychiatry.org
Visual arts, whether you're engaging in them or just appreciating them, can bring enjoyment and encouragement, but expressing oneself through art can also have physical and mental health benefits. Art therapy, a type of psychotherapy, helps provide a way to express emotions and experiences not easily expressed in words. It is not about the final product; it is about healing through the ...
Quotes on the healing power of Art Therapy
It's part of the entire model of care.". "The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician. Therefore the physician must start from nature, with an open mind.". "Art can permeate the very deepest part of us, where no words exist.". "Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world ...
Why art? The role of arts in arts and health
Art causes physical reactions: tears, goose flesh, accelerated heartbeats, smiles, etc. It can make us feel fear, love, longing, and awe. The perception of art involves commitment, engagement, identification, and acting out (as in the extreme case of "head banging"). In one word—we live the artwork with our bodies.
Art making and expressive art therapy in adult health and nursing care
2.1. The arts and art making in health and nursing care. In a Health Evidence Network synthesis report from the World Health Organization [], researchers found evidence that the arts play a major role in the promotion of good health, the prevention of a range of mental and physical health conditions, and the treatment or management of conditions arising across the life-course.
"The Art of Healing: The effects and importance of art in ...
This paper discusses the history of the inclusion of art in hospitals and clinical settings, and how the presence and effectiveness of art has been vital to one's healing journey from illness. Often, art is used as wall-fillers within healthcare facilities, and irregularly updated or cared for. This essay will provide imagery and descriptions of successful art that has been chosen or ...
This Chinese illustrator is healing people through her art
Art helped her express her feelings and connect with people. "It became a language, a chance to communicate with people so they could better understand the Asian community," she says.
The Healing Possibilities of The Art Therapy
The process of creating art is a venture that evokes creativity, problem solving, and self-expression. The process of creating art is also healing and comforting, which produces the necessity for the field of art therapy. Art therapy successfully combines creating art and reflection in a way that helps a variety of populations to heal, grow ...
What are the healing arts?
Summary. The healing arts are a group of holistic, alternative, and nonmedical practices, which practitioners claim promote health and well-being. The healing arts include a wide range of ...
Renée Fleming talks new book "Music and Mind"
Renée Fleming is a five-time Grammy winner, a Kennedy Center honoree and a longtime advocate for the healing power of the arts. For her new book "Music and Mind," Fleming collected essays from ...
The Haiti That Still Dreams
The last time I saw St. Eloi was in 2019, in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince's Centre d'Art, where he had a series of metal birds on display, their bejewelled bodies and beaks pointing toward ...
Simple Morality Never Makes Great Art
Mx. Silverman is a playwright and the author, most recently, of the novel "There's Going to Be Trouble." When I was in college, I came across "The Sea and Poison," a 1950s novel by ...
Opinion
Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She reported from Nashville. The volunteer black walnut sapling in our front yard ...
Audio Essay: John Dickerson discusses the art of slow-looking and how
In this week's essay, John discusses the art of attention and how to develop the skill of slow-looking. Notebook Entries: Notebook 75, page 8. September 2021. 1016. Notebook 1, page 54. June 1990
Opinion
Mr. Foster's film, "My Octopus Teacher," won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2021. He wrote from Simon's Town, South Africa. I was gifted with a new way of seeing the day ...
Opinion
Re "Why We Need to Talk About Teen Sex," by Peggy Orenstein (Opinion guest essay, April 14): As a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst who has worked for decades with teens and college-age ...