INNER IMAGES: Art Assignments help start conversations between clients and therapists to expose and deal with unconscious or emotionally charged feelings.
Science/Health
June 27, 1996
By Wevonneda Minis Of The Post and Courier staff
Clients, who draw a blank when faced with revealing their innermost feelings to psychotherapists are getting help through art, mental health professionals say.
Over the past 10 years, mental health clients in south Carolina increasingly have painted, sketched and molded their way to better coping skills and self-esteem.
Clients who create art in their therapy sessions often come to express their feelings more easily says Lucy Lee Collins, president of the South Carlina Association of Art Therapists. In fact, the assignments help start conversations between client and therapist to expose and deal with unconscious or emotionally charged feelings. For that reason, it often is prescribed for people who are progressing slowly in traditional therapy. Sessions can be taken in individual or group settings.
Collins says standard therapy sessions involving a client and counselor or psychiatrist may get the client where he needs to go. But with art therapy, she adds, he’ll probably get there faster.
“It’s like a left-hander who can cut with any scissors,” she explains. “They might cut even better with scissors for left-handed people.”
Dianne Tennyson, a local art therapist with Carolina Counseling Associates, says art therapy not only speeds up the therapeutic process, it often uncovers things that other therapists do not.
“This is not some new age hippie kind of thing,” says Tennyson. “In other areas of the country, art therapy is flourishing. People are willing to pay the $65 to $75 an hour.
“If there is mental illness, everybody can benefit,” she adds. “Images won’t lie. And there’s no telling what will come out.”
Art therapists have a master’s degrees or the equivalent and may be registered with the American Association of Art therapy. Like Tennyson, who is working on her registration, they study both art and mental health.
And some of those working in South Carolina say that the field is often misunderstood. Some people think they mend broken art, others that they work exclusively with artists who have been in accident. Others just think they are selling snake oil.
The increase of such therapists in South Carolina, five to twenty since the mid-1980’s Shows increasing popularity of art therapy. A typical session goes something like this:
Barabara Naderi, an art therapists and licensed counselor with the Berkeley county Mental Health Center, first sits across a table from her clients, usually children, for a chat. She already knows what issues or behaviors have caused them to come into therapy. But she will try to determine what’s going on with them at the moment. Once she has established that, she will give them a specific art task.
Naderi might invite her clients to use one of her brightly colored Crayola marking pens to draw a picture showing how they feel. Or she might ask them to pick one of the balls of brightly colored modeling and make something.
She either watches them carry out assignment or works across from them. Whichever way, her involvement is only to the extent required to elicit information.
Nancy Hackard, an art therapist at Charleston Behavioral Health System, says the required training teaches art therapists to look for symbols in clients’ work. ” We learn how to evaluate the artwork,” says Hackard. “Sometimes I know that a certain thing means something in their life.
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