Art therapy as social action

Oct 10, 2017 marks the 25th anniversary of World Mental Health Day, a milestone in our global efforts to bring issues of mental health into open, public discourse. 2017 also marks an important mid-point in the WHO’s Mental Health Action Plan 2013-2020, a long-term global initiative aimed towards strengthening integrated mental health care services internationally— a project powered by social enterprises such as this.

Yet, as governments and institutions scramble to fund and politically bolster their mental health infrastructures, underlying issues continue to simmer. In what appears to be a crisis of individualized disorders of the psyche, what are the collective, socio-political structures that determine such states of disability? Considering the mission of Center Pottery, we further ask: how may therapeutic services, especially those of the creative arts therapies, be at once individual and introspective processes, while also serving as societal change-agents?

In The Art Therapist as social activist: Reflections and Visions, Maxine Borowsky Junge reflects: ‘All too often [art] therapists heal what is already wounded and do not attend to the milieu which wounds and re-wounds again and more deeply.’ In another provocative statement, James Hillman writes: ‘My practice tells me that I can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of the self and neurosis of the world…’ While perhaps an extreme conflation of individual and collective pathologies, these musings resonate with a troubling empirical reality. As WHO statistics suggest, significant correlations are found between diminished mental well-being and measured states of socio-economic pressures, such as gender and racial discrimination, stressful work conditions, poverty, and inadequate education and housing. The heart of an individual’s mental condition, beyond her genetic predisposition or biology, is also the function of a complex web of external determinants. What she brings to the therapeutic space bears its cultural, economic, spiritual and psychological dimensions.

As developed in the previous post, a creative arts therapy, especially one that enlists a non-verbal form of expression, may seem at face value to be a soft form of treatment in comparison to the clinical action of pharmacological treatments. Yet, as emerging studies are beginning to suggest, it is the very generative, multivalent nature of art therapies that offers the conditions for a rich, self-integrating process that can arguably contain and work through, rather than resist, the inevitable ambivalences in an individual’s relationship with her environment. Notable examples of individual trauma healing with clay art therapy, or collective projects addressing issues of homelessness, or collective responses to terrorism suggest the exciting potential of art therapies as a form of grounded social activism.

Thus, returning to the question of art therapy’s ethical accountability:

Junge asks, in another work: ‘As art therapists are we too often helping people adjust to a destructive society?’; in attending to an individual’s wounds through a symbolized healing in a tactile material, are we ignoring, or perhaps even allowing, the continued existence of the less visible socio-political oppressions—collective wounds—that shape her life?

It is a difficult question to ponder over, but one that should remain in the heart of any aspiring art therapeutic social enterprise committed towards creating not only better forms of mental health care, but a better world. While remaining open-ended, it is perhaps through a resolved commitment to the craft, an enterprising collaboration with other mental health care institutions, and, above all, a sensitivity towards the wider milieu from which each individual emerges, that will make each effort from a small art therapeutic enterprise a socially galvanizing one.

Works referenced:

Mental Health Action Plan 2013-2020: http://www.who.int/mental_health/publications/action_plan/en/

Dan Hocoy, Art Therapy and Social Action: A Transpersonal Framework. Art Therapy: Jounral of the American Art Therapy Association, 22, 7-16.

Junge, M. B., Alvarez, J. F. Kellogg, A., Volker, C., The Art Therapist as social activist: Reflections and Visions. Art Therapy: Jounral of the American Art Therapy Association, 10, 148-155.