In my personal capacity, I shall hardly be able to give a comprehensive report of ART-THERAPY in India. As far as I know , at least in urban sector, under the umbrella of institutions, universities, art-schools & psychology departments Visual art is not yet considered as a tool for therapy for mental distress. It may be mentioned here that Music –therapy or Dance-therapy are relatively more acceptable and practiced in some institutions.
On the other hand, we truly have no dearth of resource persons necessary for conducting Art-therapy . We have huge number of trained artists , psychologists, psychiatrists & psychotherapists . We have rich vocabulary of folk-art. We also find a good number of social-workers, who use art-materials and art-activity with the purpose of SOCIAL-THERAPY, specially for underprivileged and mentally challenged children.
At the same time, we know that the use and practice of Art- therapy has increased exponentially all over the world. I personally believe that our country which is basically multi-linguistic, Visual language has a special scope for communication in expression of inner self.
So I believe that there is a wide need to spread the concept and facilities of Art-therapy befitting our socio-cultural context. We have been running an Art-therapy clinic at a NGO , DANA (www.danakolkata.org ), Kolkata, for last four years. Our team of psychologist, artist and psychiatrist have been working with adult psychiatrist patients.
We also organize annual conference to review our works and to interact with experts of related disciplines. Broadly we like to focus our discourses on (1) Creativity and creative process and ( 2 ) Visual Language as a form of non-verbal communication.
Next year we like to hold our annual-meet sometime in the month of March 2016. We have been heartily trying to reach to all the like-mind professionals. Please feel free to communicate your views and enrich our vision.
DR. DEBASIS BHATTACHARYA
( www.drdebasis.com )
