What is Art Therapy?

Art Therapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses artwork to facilitate change.

A patient's unconscious feelings can often be more immediately expressed through visual images. These images are themselves regarded as a form of symbolic communication. Art therapy does not depend upon artistic or technical ability. Using a non-directive approach, the therapist encourages the patient to explore the meanings of his spontaneous pictures by free association and direct interpretation. The therapeutic art experiences develops physical, emotional, and/or learning skills. The use of art as therapy implies that the creative process can be a means both of reconciling emotional conflicts and of fostering self-awareness and personal growth.

How long has art therapy been around?

Art has always had beneficial effects on humans, since ancient peoples painted the walls of caves to honor the animals they killed for food. In clinical environments, however, art was first used diagnostically during the 1800's as psychiatrists noted that the spontaneous artwork of inpatients reflected changes in the patients' level of integration. For example, the disorganized patients artwork looked disorganized, the patients with little energy made impoverished artwork, and the patients that hallucinated would sometimes depict their hallucinations visually. As these patients got better, the artwork they were producing looked more organized, rich and developed, or reality based. The first "art therapists" began harnessing the therapeutic effects of art making and gaining recognition during the 1930's and 1940's. Coincidentally, that was about the same time dialysis technology was developed.

How can artwork change a person?

Art making is a natural, healthy human behavior that promotes:

• Communication: interpersonal and interpersonal
• Problem solving skills such as risk taking, decision making, experimenting, tolerating failures and using them to find new solutions, etc.
• Resolving personal conflicts, working through emotional and cognitive problems.
• Self awareness: "Concretizing" the inner self.
• Emotional catharsis
• Feelings of accomplishment
• autonomy, through an assertive, self-directed act.

Furthermore, the permanence and tangibility of artwork makes them useful in reflecting on the development and evolution of a person's sense of identity and autonomy.

Where is art therapy appropriate?

Art therapy is effective with people of all ages; it can be used with individuals and groups in clinical, educational and rehabilitative settings. Art therapy can be a primary or parallel therapy in community mental health centers, nursing homes, schools, halfway houses, hospitals, prisons and private practice settings.

What are the Benefits of Art Therapy?

• Art therapy works from a point of strength: an individual's creativity.
• In art therapy the image of a dream, fantasy, or experience is depicted in visual form, rather than having to be translated into words.
• Art therapy helps people develop their creativity. This learning is then transferred to other aspects of daily living.
• Art therapy is a channel to the unconscious and an increase in spontaneous expression.
• An art therapy product is separate from the individual. Because the individual can view this artwork, with some objectivity, the process of self-exploration becomes exciting.
• The art therapy process encourages the development of mastery over problems through the manipulation of symbolic images.
• The permanence of artwork provides a documentation of patterns, change and growth.