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Can Collage-Based Art Therapy be a Bridge to Engage Patients Experiencing Social Isolation with a Diagnosis of a Psychotic Disorder?
Get PDFSocial isolation is not only a common part of the experience of people with psychotic disorders but also often acts as a barrier to their treatment and recovery. Causes of this isolation seem to include not only symptoms of the psychotic illnesses themselves but also the social stigma related to psychotic illnesses, as well as feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, and low self-esteem related to common comorbid disorders. Engaging with patients in acute inpatient units with short lengths of stay can be extremely difficult. This paper reviews the literature and describes a collage-based art intervention with six particularly isolative patients in an acute inpatient unit, with emphasis on a supportive one-to-one approach. The patient’s levels of activity were observed before and after the directive. The positive experience of the actual intervention and common themes are described, as well as an encouraging trend towards increased engagement afterward
COVID, Creativity, and Connecting Through Change: Reviewing the Literature on How Art Therapy Can Help Children and Adolescents Cope with Pandemic-Related Grief
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the most significant global events in the past century, both resulting in massive casualties and significant mental health outcomes across the world. Some of the most impacted populations are children and adolescents whose lives have been interrupted during their formative years. The purpose of this literature review is to explore how art therapy has been used during the COVID-19 pandemic to address the grief experienced by children and adolescents through their losses of stability and peer support surrounded by uncertainty. This literature review seeks to understand exactly how the pandemic has affected the mental health of young people, the definition of grief beyond death, and what art therapy can do to begin healing from these losses. Findings of this review reveal that there is more research to be done on this specific subject, but the work of grief art therapy so far has laid a foundation for further exploration. Meaning construction theory paired with developmentally appropriate directives may be most effective with this population
Growing In Grief: A Meaning-Making Expressive Arts Therapy Method Developed for Bereaved Youth
Get PDFApproximately 5.3 million youth in the United States have experienced the death of a sibling or parent. They face challenges such as an increased risk of depression, anxiety, substance use, and other detrimental effects on adjustment. A small subset of this population experiences significant emotional and behavioral difficulties, characterized by an inability to function in major life roles, a preoccupation with the loss, and separation distress. Modern grief literature describes meaning-making as an adaptive coping process contributing to a sense of renewed hope and self-efficacy and a reduction in distressing grief symptomology. Expressive arts therapy is an effective way to explore meaning-making processes. For this thesis, the researcher developed and implemented an expressive arts therapy method to understand how the arts impact meaning-making at a community bereavement center. The participants were twelve children who had experienced the death of a sibling or a parent. They were males and females, between the ages of eight and fifteen. Ten identified as white/Caucasian, one as Chinese, and one as other / mixed race. The researcher observed participants engaged in meaning-making processes through visual artistic expression. Through artistic and qualitative inductive analysis, the primary themes identified were active creation, moving forward, feeling stuck, non-verbal expression, seeking connection, oscillation, deep emotion, and yearning. These findings support the capacity of expressive arts therapy to inspire meaning-making processes in bereaved youth. This phenomenological study supports continued empirical research on expressive arts therapy with bereaved youth
“Staged Combat”: A Literature Review on the Potential Advantages of Drama Therapy Over Traditional Talk Therapy With Veterans
Get PDFThere is an ongoing disconnect between military veterans and mental health with a vast majority of veterans either unable or unwilling to seek therapy. This may be a result of traditional talk therapy being ineffective with the veteran population; drama therapy may be a recourse that can better bridge the gap between veterans and therapy. Veterans experience trauma not just through means of combat overseas, but via training and transitioning out of the military as well, all culminating in a psychological regression. With the given population, emerging adulthood would be the period that veterans regress to as it is when most trauma experienced in the military occurs. Additionally, a veteran’s emerging adulthood is truncated by their military service; they are incentivized to leap into adulthood via milestones like marriage and childrearing in exchange for better benefits. In so doing, the veteran, unknown to them, is stuck in a limbo between perpetual adolescence and adulthood. Methods mainly meant for one or the other are insufficient and therefore could benefit from being combined. Drama therapy and its core processes may cater well to the unique needs and cultural stigmas to which veterans adhere. Where traditional therapy falters (e.g., intellectualizing the issue, focusing on the trauma, embracing vulnerability), drama therapy has potential to consistently contribute through distancing, therapeutic expression, exploration of multidimensional relationships, and fun/play
Sandtray Therapy through the lens of the Expressive Therapies Continuum: Helping children who experienced trauma tap into their creative potential
Get PDFThis study explores the use of Sandtray therapy with children in middle childhood who have experienced trauma. Sandtray therapy allows children to create a world of their own with sand and symbolic figures. It supports children’s need for autonomy and provides a way to engage in healing through playful and non-verbal means. Based on the intermodal nature of Sandtray therapy, it was presumed that the Expressive Therapies Continuum (ETC) could be used alongside the intervention as an assessment tool to better understand how development impacts artmaking. Based on the developmental needs of this population, a method including play and art-making seemed best. For that reason, an adapted sandtray was developed, ensuring that it was best suited to travel and allowing for each student to have a similar experience, despite meeting them in different settings. Each child had a 45-minute session in which they had the opportunity to interact with the tray. Knowing the contradictions between Sandtray\u27s natural blend of all levels of the ETC and the developmental limitations of this population, this study hoped to illuminate Sandtray’s ability to enhance children’s art-making capacities, allowing them to work at all levels of the ETC. Using Sandtray, it became clear how each child felt most comfortable engaging in the art-making process, which coincided with their developmental milestones. Further, research pointed out how Sandtray can uncover symbols that may not be conscious to the child but can inform the therapist and provide further connections
La Pausa Sagrada: Embodiment of Relational-Cultural Mindfulness- Development of a Method
Get PDFThis paper addresses the history, theory, and practices in relational-cultural therapy (RCT), mindfulness, and phototherapy, the theoretical and philosophical foundations upon which I developed a method integrating related practices and approaches. The method combined relational cultural mindfulness, mindful photography, and phototherapy for promoting stress reduction and well-being in Mexican mothers of children with developmental disabilities. Research shows that parents of children with disabilities such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience even greater amounts of parental stress, due to the child behavior problems presented in children with ASD and the holistic impact they have on family life (Torbet et al., 2019). Extensive research measuring the effects of mindfulness practices on mental health support that mindfulness practices foster a variety of positive health outcomes, such as the reduction of stress, anxiety, and depression, and increased in self-awareness and self-regulation. With this increase in self and interoceptive awareness, empowerment and resilience are other therapeutic benefits, as the practice of phototherapy engages individual and collective processes of decision making, reflection, and dialogue. This phototherapy and mindfulness-based expressive arts therapy intervention sought to promote stress reduction, self-care, and well-being in mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder and Down syndrome
The Breath as a Holistic Regulator: An Expressive Arts Therapy Community Project
Get PDFThis capstone offers the idea that evolution has challenged appropriate breathing and led humans to breathe incorrectly, thus negatively affecting their physical and mental health. As breath can damage the body, it can also serve as a regulator of the mind and body. This thesis points out the multiple effects when uniting controlled respiration, drumming and nature sounds. Breathing, music and nature have many things in common. These include repetition, pattern, awareness of the present moment and relaxation. They all contain a rhythm, and they offer self-regulatory skills. Music-based expressive arts therapies intervention is postulated to provide breathing techniques, united to a rhythm and natural sounds to redirect the unconscious breathing to a more controlled one with the purpose of self-regulation and an increased holistic wellbeing. A one- hour indoor workshop was presented for the expressive arts therapy graduate community. The indoor workshop combined nature sounds and two guiding breathing techniques which would be aligned with the tempo of a drum playing by this author. Later participants would broaden their experience by an intermodal process of creative arts. This exploration is referred to as experiencing the impact of the breath and rhythm on the mind, body, emotions and spirit. The results illustrate that the use of breath in an expressive therapy intervention invokes calmness of the mind, increases physical energy and relaxation of the body, provides self-regulation of emotions, access creativity and internal exploration, builds repetition which motivates flow, and signals a connection to the personal and transpersonal self
Mindfulness-Based Gratitude: Curriculum Guide for an Online Six-Week Course
Get PDFThis is a two-part paper. The first part of the paper presents research on how both mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) and gratitude interventions (GIs) offer a promising way to help mitigate the physiological and psychological effects caused by chronic stress by increasing one’s overall sense of well-being (Keng et al., 2011; Wood et al., 2010). Individually, mindfulness and gratitude practices may enhance positive effect and well-being, which suggest that combining both practices may further increase positive outcomes (Hicks et al., 2017) due to their complementary nature. However, research should be approached with caution as there are many methodological limitations that need to be addressed to provide more accurate results in future study (Wood et al., 2010). The second part of this paper presents a Curriculum Guide for Facilitators: An Online Six-Week Mindfulness-Based Gratitude Course which was developed for participants to learn how to integrate mindfulness-based gratitude practices into their daily lives as a means to potentially decrease stress while increasing one’s overall sense of well-being
Reading Recovery Teacher Understandings About Language and Early Literacy Acquisition
Get PDFThis study investigated Reading Recovery teacher understandings about language and early literacy acquisition by applying a constructivist grounded theory design. Participants were Reading Recovery teachers working across three varied districts in Massachusetts (N=33). The purpose of the study was to engage Reading Recovery teachers in surveys, focus groups, interviews, and observations to understand the degree to which Reading Recovery teacher participants value varied student language patterns. Addressing biases faced upon school entry by children who speak differently than their teachers is essential. When students are identified for early literacy intervention, an asset-based frame is critical to ensure accelerated growth. The guiding question was, “What do Reading Recovery teachers understand about using language/linguistic diversity as an asset in early literacy acquisition?”. What might be learned, in terms of Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Practices (CLSP), from Reading Recovery teachers was also discussed. The theory that emerged is that engaging in reflective processes, communicating theoretical understandings regarding reciprocity, working to expand oral language flexibility, and fostering the growth of collective expertise specifically to support linguistic diversity were all necessary. The observation portion of this study found evidence of Reading Recovery teachers working to be culturally and linguistically responsive to all children including multilingual, multidialectal, and monolingual students. Five examples included in the discussion are 1. Daily explicit instruction around literary structures 2. Personalized instruction 3. Positioning the child as a writer: allowing the syntax and meaning of a child to drive conversations and determine the written message 4. Never invalidating a child\u27s syntax or semantics while fostering syntactic flexibility 5. Embedding a Told and then restating that unknown word in a meaningful phrase. Implications for pedagogical practice included working within a CLSP framework to deepen educator understandings of how to honor and teach into linguistic diversity as a strength and develop more robust theoretical and practical collective expertise on the matter. Implications for further research include deepening the connection between Reading Recovery and CLSP. Finally, in the larger field of education the work of culturally sustaining practices and linguistically sustaining practices may need to be discussed as both individual and intertwined issues
The Jewel in the Lotus: Humane Education, Engaged Buddhism, and Farming Compassion
Get PDFThis thesis explores the relationship and intersectionality of Engaged Buddhism and Humane Education and demonstrates how they support the development of a farm sanctuary to cultivate compassion. It is supported by peer-reviewed literature, which reflects the importance of understanding why compassion is necessary to decrease suffering and how these disciplines complement one another, facilitating compassion and action. The research component of this thesis encourages the ongoing exploration of Engaged Buddhism and Humane Education. Further, it contributes to the scholarly literature on their intersection, highlighting farm sanctuary work as an avenue of engagement and offering implications for future study. The creative component aims to demonstrate that developing a farm sanctuary for formerly farmed animals, focused on creating and delivering Humane Education, contributes to the development of compassion. The Jewel Farm Sanctuary will contribute to compassion for all beings through care, collaboration, connection, and content