arts therapy news
A Path with Art – Expressing Untold Kashmir
A Community based Art therapy project in Kashmir, India.
Rotary Australia World Community Service Project.
Project Description over 3-5 years
An Art Therapy Mental Health centre and program will be established in Srinagar, Kashmir providing treatment through the use of Art Therapy. This project will focus on people who suffer from mental health issues including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, anxiety and drug addictions.
The program will provide relief and healing through the use of Art therapy and counseling. The program will consist of organized groups (workshops) and Individual sessions. The sessions will assist the sufferers in working through traumatic events, grief and loss, providing relief from stress, increasing self-esteem and confidence, enhancing creativity and healing.
The centre will also provide training for eligible participants in the practice of Art therapy. These participants will learn the required skills to work with the community of Kashmir who suffer from mental health issues. The centre will provide Art therapy to the Psychiatric Hospital as well service community areas by providing Art therapy
camps in some of the worst effected areas throughout Kashmir. The Art Therapy groups and program will provide a space and opportunity for people to use the creative process to express and explore their feelings of frustration, anger, entrapment, grief and loss. The Art making then becomes a way of creating new pathways
to a more authentic and positive sense of self, increasing self worth and self-esteem. The Art therapy group provides a way to find new meaning and to develop a sense of community and trust amongst the group participants.
Please consider donating to this worthwhile Mental Health project?
Your donations will assist in
• Buying Art materials.
• Art paper, stationary and documentation.
• Sponsoring students to be trained in Art therapy practices and techniques.
• Providing Art Kits to children in some of the worst affected border areas.
• Providing a regular venue for the centre.
• Funding Venue, transport and meals while attending to the village camps.
• Administration and facilitation fees.
To Donate go to: www.rawcs.com.au
Search for the project on the right hand side of the page. Then select district 9455 here you will see the project
titled “Psychiatric Art therapy – A path with art”. Project Number is WR – 014 – 2011. Press Donate button on top of page and fill in form.
For more info: please contact Dena Lawrence – 0427 466 796, Email firesun@bigpond.com
Arshid Rasool – +9194 1900 0185, Email – editorgadyal@gmail.com
New e-book out by ANZATA member Sheridan Linnell
Art Psychotherapy & Narrative Therapy: An Account of Practitioner Research
Rethinking Research and Professional Practices in Terms of Relationality, Subjectivity and Power
Author: Sheridan Linnell
Series Editor: Bronwyn Davies
Visit: www.benthamscience.com/ebooks
Or email: ebooks@benthamscience.org
In this compelling, engaging and lovingly crafted book, Sheridan Linnell presents us with a very vivid account of practitioner research in the form of a ‘discursive hall of mirrors’. She portrays the moments of intersection between the author’s life lived as a therapist, activist, feminist and ‘person’, and her contact with a rich reservoir of poststructuralist ideas and practices, illustrated with textually and visually poignant and politically purposeful accounts from therapeutic practice. Linnell uses a non-linear narrative form of ‘writing as inquiry’ to weave/embroider/wander nomadically across the landscapes of poststructuralist/therapeutic/arts-based research and practice. She has an excellent visual and textual story-telling ability, and I found myself reading late into the night in order to finish each chapter and get on to the next. Sheridan Linnell has found a way of engaging readers with complex ideas that is clearly and even brilliantly articulated, yet without the suggestions of certainty or fixity that can often accompany such endeavours. The early chapters that offer the creative fiction of the department store (storeys) of poststructural/feminist/postcolonial theory are a delicious vehicle for interrogating these ideas. In later chapters, we glance into a studio, a kitchen, an ethics of living, entering into spaces and relationships that are, by implication, highly nuanced exemplars of myriad other spaces and relationships and encounters. We are moved, and touched by these stories and made uncomfortable. This book stands as an original, indeed a unique contribution to the literature on expressive therapies/art therapy, not the least because it situates these endeavours within a discursively constructed world of social engagement and political action. The effect of reading this book is different for each of us, and we are left with traces that may take seed, rather than findings or conclusions.
ANZATA member, Sonia Stace, is published in the International Journal of Art Therapy
In June 2011 NSW ANZATA member Sonia Stace had an article published in the International Journal of Art Therapy (16:1). The article is titled ‘Confusion and containment: Art therapy with an adolescent hospitalised with paediatric neuropsychiatric Systemic Lupus Erythematosus’.
Sonia worked with several children and young people at the children’s hospital but experienced a lot of uncertainty regarding the value of her therapeutic relationship with one particular young person, ‘Wendy’. Her uncertainty was exacerbated by the lack of information pertaining to art therapy and Wendy’s medical condition, neuropsychiatric Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (npSLE).
While working with Wendy Sonia often considered writing a journal article to help others in similar situations. She wanted to provide some insight into an art therapist’s experience with a young person who had severe symptom manifestations of npSLE.
Sonia holds a Master of Art Therapy (UWS), Bachelor of Social Work (University of Sydney), and a Diploma of Statutory Child Protection (TAFE). She currently works as an art therapist in an adult mental health hospital and as a social worker in a child protection service. She completed her art therapy clinical internships in an adult mental health hospital and a children’s hospital (psychological medicine) in Australia.
Article abstract
There is a dearth of information regarding art therapy with people diagnosed with neuropsychiatric Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (npSLE). Art therapy was an individual component of a broader consultation-liaison treatment intervention of a female adolescent who had ongoing and severe symptoms of refractory npSLE, including confusion, agitation, flat affect, echolalia, psychosis, and Parkinsonian features. She also displayed limited non-verbal and verbal communication, with her presentation differing from week to week and often fluctuating during each art therapy session. Due to the symptom manifestations of npSLE it was necessary for me to help her engage with art therapy. Each session provided freedom for expression in a safe containing space, which assisted her to manage some difficult feelings and for themes to emerge. The article reflects on some of the engagement strategies I adopted, as well as examples of containment and recurring themes. In summary, art therapy assisted to provide a space where engagement and containment were enabled, themes emerged, and a meaningful therapeutic relationship developed.
Art Therapy Articles of Interest to Members
Sweeney, Susan. (2009) Art therapy: promoting wellbeing in rural and remote communities, Australasian
Psychiatry, 17(1), S151 — S154
Springham, N. (2008) Through the eyes of the law: What is it about art that can harm people? International Journal of Art Therapy: Inscape. 13(2) December. UK: Routledge
Summary of article by Jill Westwood 2009
Click here to read this article
Woods, Kate. (2009) Appreciating Art Therapy. Medical Observer, 10 July 2009
Click here to read this article
If you have any art therapy news that you think would be of interest to other arts therapists, please send it Jill at web@anzata.org to be posted up on this page.