Art Therapy
Art therapy is the use of visual arts materials to identify and treat emotional trauma and mental disorders. By creating images in drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs, patients provide information about suppressed feelings and buried memories that they cannot express with words.
This approach is also an important aspect of rehabilitation programs for people who are recovering from a stroke or an injury affecting hand function. It can help disable people to improve their self-image and depressed or elderly patients to expend their range of expression.
WHEN IT USED
Art therapy is used with patients who cannot or will not employ words to achieve the personal insight that is a corner-stone of traditional psychotherapy. By surmounting language barriers, this therapy can be especially effective with disturbed children and patients who speak a different language from the therapist. It is also helpful in rehabilitating hand/motor skills following a stroke or injury and assessing the progress of a patient by comparing an early attempt at a self-portrait with a similar attempt after physical therapy.
HOW IT WORKS
By providing a patient with a nonverbal means of expressing repressed thoughts and feelings, art therapy can help ease guilt and anger. Sexually abused children often render images whose meaning can eventually be discussed. Through drawings and paintings, a schizophrenic patient may offer the therapist a view into a disordered mind, thus providing some clues for how treatment might proceed.
Art therapy can also enable mentally ill deaf adults to describe early conflicts with family members and to alleviate symptoms of aggression, hostility, and depression. Physically handicapped children, neglected elderly persons, alcoholics, and prison inmates all can be helped to build self-esteem through sculpture, painting, or photography, especially when they see their work exhibited for other people’s appreciation.
PRECAUTIONS
- All art materials used in a therapeutic setting, especially by children, should be nontoxic.
- People with allergies should be especially careful about the contents of paints and solvents.
