[LAUIL601] Secondary Research: TEDxTalk - Art Therapy A World Beyond Creative Expression with Carol Hammal

https://youtu.be/Ee9iRmGFyvA

Art Therapy: A World Beyond Creative Expression by TEDx Talks. Video posted on 2 Feb 2015.

• Speaker, Carol, talks of her experience in a Computer Science degree. Had a bad night, reached for paper and charcoal with no intention. Strokes turned into form which made a face. Showed it to her professor next day who explained this was a form of art therapy to herself.
• Directed to go to library and read about art therapy
• Always fascinated by link between art and psychology. Art therapy does exactly that - linking psychology with the art.
• "Mother of Art Therapy" is Margaret Naumburg. established the Walden School in her home city of New York in 1915. She is widely viewed as the primary founder of the American art therapy movement. It wasn't until 1967 in Philadelphia that ? introduced the first Art Therapy program. Ira something. A few years later they created the American Art Therapy Association. Its main purpose was to set the guidelines for the program and approve them for an equal standard of education to train art therapists. 
• What is art therapy and what is it not? Art therapy is not an activity where people draw and paint and feel better.
• Art Therapy definition from the American Art Therapy Association: "Art therapy is a mental health profession that uses the creative process of art making to improve and enhance the physical, mental and emotional well-being of individuals of all ages. It is based on the belief that the creative process involved in artistic self-expression helps people to resolve conflicts and problems, develop interpersonal skills, manage behaviour, reduce stress, increase self-esteem and self-awareness, and achieve insight.
• At therapy it's a lot more than just making art. It is a clinical field. 
• It falls under the main umbrella of creative arts therapies. There are many kinds: dance and movement therapy, music therapy, play therapy, writing therapy, drama therapy and art therapy. 
• When we say art - we are focusing on visual art: painting, drawing, sculpting
• Here is an example of two components used in a session. We have "art as therapy" and "art as psychotherapy." Art as therapy is informal with an open studio format and it focuses on giving the client a final art product that is coherent. Art psychotherapy has a lot more components involved is a psychodynamic approach which is much more clinical. Less time is spent on the art work but it always involves two things, art making and a verbal process. Through the verbal, the patient's analysis and interpretations can be used of the artwork. Focus isn't on a finished piece of art. The aim is more on the creative process itself to achieve insight.
• A session typically lasts between 50 minutes to an hour. There are vague directives from the therapist to allow the client to express themselves. Representative, visualisation task (drawing themselves as a tree) with open ended questions to invite answers. In art as therapy, more time would be given to create a finished piece. 
• Art making decreases your defenses. Externalise your thoughts and feelings through the creative process. The piece of paper or canvas becomes a representation of your unconscious. In art therapy we make the unconscious conscious. Through that process is how you start gaining insight, start resolving conflicts, always using symbolic reference in the artwork.
• The case depends on the approach - art as therapy or art psychotherapy 
• Who is art therapy for? Who do we practice art therapy with? There's a perception that art therapy belongs in an art studio. Art therapy is more successful if implemented in clinical settings like hospitals. nursing homes or outpatient centres. Educational settings. Apply art therapy in a lot of settings. 
• Specialism is art therapy. Being trained to the point of specialist areas within art therapy. For example doing art therapy in educational settings. Medical art therapy. Not looking to cure a disease but to help through the mental aspect of it. Forensic art therapy. Mainly used in court, going as far as to use art therapists as experts in a court case and use art work as evidence. 
• Of all the creative arts therapies, art therapy is the only one that has standardised research and so much information first hand on all the sessions. 
• Gives an example of a patient with OCD who was obsessive with cleaning her house. Clay was an important tool to tackle in art therapy because it can get under the nails and on the skin. Built up trust and rapport first, then opened fresh clay packet together.  Through the act of making and role play, made her house out of clay and identified that this would be cleaner and tidier than her own house could be. Acted out her fear on a smaller scale in a safe space. Art as a component to overcome fear. Leaving out the verbal. Then attended groups and engaged with other patients. 
• Carol is in Egypt. Egypt has a huge stigma about therapy. It is the nature of the culture, they are a very suppressed society. They don't feel comfortable talking about their issues. Art therapy is different because you don't need to talk if you don't want to. But as mentioned, art making breaks down the defences and you will at least want to talk about what you are making. The dynamic is very useful and makes it more successful in a place like Egypt in comparison to the West, because our stigma is higher. 

Reflection: The YouTube comments were very agreeable to read as this was indeed a very US-centric view of art therapy. In my research I found that The British artist Adrian Hill coined the term art therapy in 1942. Hill, recovering from tuberculosis in a sanatorium, discovered the therapeutic benefits of drawing and painting while convalescing. Nevertheless, this was from Carol's experience and as the talk went on she had a lot of interesting points and was very thorough unlike a lot of other videos I had watched.