The Arts of Healing

I recently made a presentation of the Art Cart at Aurora Baycare Medical Center in Green Bay. On the Art Cart we offer tools of the arts to patients free of charge, as well as crafts and a few entertainment items like puzzle books. The cart was put together by three of us who wanted to offer patients the benefits that each of us enjoys by the arts we practice, and the hospital administration was fully supportive with funding. We know that the arts can be therapeutic and hope to utilize creativity to improve the patient’s care.

With the unveiling of the cart I spoke on several ways the arts may help a patient. The arts we are able to offer relate to writing, drawing, and painting. We are not able to offer art therapy, as such, as this requires the professional art therapist and ongoing treatment. In the hospital setting we realize it may be difficult to offer any sort of art class to the patient as few stay for more than two days. We are only able to offer them an opportunity to experience the benefits of art.

Of the several ways art may help the patient, the first, and obvious, is to provide a diversion. If the patient is preoccupied with their condition it may worsen. We provide light entertainments such as crosswords and word finds, which are the most popular items, as well as trivia books, paint-by-numbers, and joke books. We like to provide some thought-engaging entertainment.
Art may preoccupy the mind of the patient to the extent that they overlook their current condition, or, at least, make them less aware of time spent in the current condition. When drawing I find it easy to spend three hours on a piece, without watching the clock, only afterward realizing it.

The arts offered, of course, may be used to express the condition, rather than overlook it. Creatively expressing the condition may give the patient some distance from the event, perhaps even lead to some objectivity. Emotions are expressed, and so the act of creativity is personal. In that sense it is subjective. But turning emotion into something concrete – shapes, colors, words – is a sort of translation into terms others may understand. Art turns emotion into symbolism. Such a translation may lead to observing the condition from multiple perspectives. When I wanted to write, in poetry, about a life-changing event – the fracture of my ankle – I thought in terms of imagery. To convey the kind of pain caused by the injury, and the life-long disability resulting from it, I wrote about the specific incidents it affected, like how walking on a wood chip trail became so difficult. It was deeply personal, and, in a sense, the act of creativity could be painful in recalling the events and realizing the significance of the loss. In my effort to convey the significance in imagery, I had to realize it. Still, it had some healing effect.

That sort of epiphany that every artist hopes for is how art may serve the patient in the most significant way. That is how art is therapeutic. I do not know what I will write until I start to write. When I went through health problems I spoke to people, whether in a social or a hospital setting, usually in clinical terms. I wrote in personal terms. Sometimes the art was so personal I did not share it with anyone else. I did not want to show my anger. But the act of creativity helped me to put my thoughts and feelings into order, and afterward I could share some of them without being too personal. The act of creativity helped me to make order out of chaos, as Robert Frost said was his reason for writing poetry.

There is a final way that creativity can help the patient, and that is the product itself. (I hate to use such a laborious word – product – but the alternatives are work of art or art piece, which are just as bad.) When I created some thing out of my experience, even if it was an expression of anger or despair, I had made that which could not exist by any other means. As I am unique for the total of my experiences, so was this art. Take away my experience of pain and I would not be the same. I don’t know if I would be a better man for it or not, but I find some fulfillment in who I am now. And so I find some fulfillment in what I’ve created.