It’s been quiet on the Green Glass Moors lately. I’ve been busy with a lot of writing projects for news sites. But today I heard something that gave me pause, and I decided I needed to blog about it.
I’ve done one story already, and am working on a second, that relates to art therapy. The first was about an innovative theater company that works with young people to address real issues teens face. This program started in a long term care facility for teens with behavioral problems and mental health issues. According to Adam Arnold, the counselor who started the program, the ability for these troubled teens to develop their creativity through an acting class had a transformational effect on their lives. The second, which I am working on now, is a story about Minneapolis artist Amy Rice, who has been an advocate for artists with mental health issues for a number of years. She used to work in a day program for people with disabilities. Under her direction, the people in the program went from making macaroni art to drawing, painting, and other fine arts. Again, the ability to truly express themselves creatively became an important part of the participants’ emotional well-being.
Both Arnold and Rice told an almost identical story–that the participants in the programs they directed started out identifying themselves with their illness (“Hi, I’m Dave, and I have __ disorder”) and eventually came to identify as artists (“Hi, I’m Dave, and I’m an artist”). It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out how such a change in self-identification could help people discover self-esteem, hope, and a better quality of life for the first time in their lives.
But both Arnold and Rice said that these programs were defunded–state funds dried up, or a more corporate care center bought out the smaller care center and phased out the art therapy. And in these times where the primary mode of discourse we hear over and over again is that of scarcity, it’s not too hard for me to imagine the derision with which something called “art therapy” would be treated in a congressional budget review. I’ve personally been a fly on the wall in political settings where state and federal programs with far clearer, more quantifiable benefits were sneered at. The trouble is, figuring out what the benefits of art therapy are would require not just research and number-crunching, but actually listening to the mentally ill and taking them at their word–believing them when they talk about something that has helped them and changed their lives in profound ways, and caring enough to do something about it. And political reality is so far removed right now from the reality of everyday life that I have a hard time imagining such a conversation between politicians and disabled artists ever taking place. Maybe I’m wrong, though. It’s definitely worth thinking about–I will write more on this subject later.
Photo credit: Zen Sutherland, Flickr.com