DANA organized its 2nd Seminar on Art-Therapy on 10th February, 2013 which was attended by a wide range of artists, art-therapists, activists and mental health professionals from Kolkata and other parts of India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh. The seminar was held at DANA’s own premises in Kolkata and the participants shared their experience of working with patients with mental health problems, patients suffering from cancer, patients under palliative care and jail-inmates.
While charing the seminar, Dr. Debasish Bhattacharya gave us an overview of art therapy as being practiced in recent times across the world. He emphasized on visual therapy & how its content & form plays a crucial role in understanding human psyche. He narrated the various types of art therapies that can successfully be practiced to give relief to stress & tension of mentally dysfunctional people.
The next speaker was Mr. Saumik Nandy Majumdar who happens to be a teacher of history of art at ViswabharatiUniversity, Shantiniketan. He does very interesting art appreciation projects for kids which mainly aims at inspiring spontaneous expression by them rather than teaching them art in general. He made us see that kids are natural at understanding the multi-layered paintings and giving various interpretations of the same; even perceiving the distortions & negative representations. He works mainly with the paintings of Rabindranath Tagore & has been able to greatly motivate the kids to follow their heart & paint whatever that comes to their mind while visualizing a reality.
Then we had Blaize Thomas & Atrei Dey who talked about their project on community based art intervention. They considered themselves to be art facilitators, mostly working for backward communities. Their signature project was working with the jail inmates of Udaipur jail for a span of 30 days. They had a great experience which proved that even hard core criminals could come up with such vivid expressions through forms & colors simply by some amount of motivation & freedom of expression that was given to them. There was such positive spirit that they excelled in sharing & harmoniously taking part in group activity with no aggression at all. It majorly helped in building bonds & helping them to share & mingle within themselves. They also shared their experience of working with the children of backward communities in Central India.
Next was Ms. Trina Lahiri who was mainly working with terminally ill children in Jharkhand & Orissa. She herself being a sufferer of cancer was trying to impart positive motivation to withstand the pain & try to live up to their hopes of living their dreams. She however faced much opposition from the doctors who were rather apprehensive about the healing potentials of emotional wellbeing achieved through any form of art therapy. Her focus was mainly to make them participate in various art & craft activities & her challenge was to make it enjoyable enough so that they could forget their pain for a short while & see how beautiful life still was. She even tried to help them generate income from such craftwork projects for their own sustenance. Story telling , touch therapy, dance forms & music was also incorporated to give them more reasons to celebrate life.
We had Dr. Suman Sinha, from Delhi who elucidated the current role of art therapy in mental health. He has been working out the guidelines for developing art therapy in India. Initial requirement was of having enough trained people to conduct such therapies with constructive expertise. He identified the importance of participatory art for chronic health patients. He believes that both sick & healthy people can use art therapy to enrich their life. It is considered to be cathartic & it also reduces stigma & encourages better communication. It majorly helps to cope with stress & is also helpful with schizophrenic patients. The Art Creativity & Mental Health initiative taken during 2003-5 did show some positive results.
Then we had a couple of case study sessions taken by psychologists & psychiatrists which was to envisage the extent of practical relevance of these art therapies in bringing about a positive change among mentally-ill individuals.
Rita Roy has been using art therapy with ADHD kids to help them improve their level of concentration & is making some great progress.
Subhra Banerjee Pal is using art to document expression of feelings & thought process for a better understanding of the maladaptive behaviors & cognitions of her counselees. She shared with us her experience in using visual art form with a girl with exam phobia &one guy suffering from OCD. In both the cases she was able to track the pattern of perceptible change in their behavior by observing their pictorial representations.
Dr. Subir Bandopadhyay has also found visual art to be very helpful in comprehending the complex mental state of his patients. The sketches his patients reproduced were often clear indication of their confused state or acute emotional turmoil.
Dr. Abhiruchi Chatterjee narrated a very interesting case of a young married lady with distinctive signs of dissociative disorder. The pictures she drew were directly referring to her mixed-up identity in extreme stressful situations. Here the medium worked to explicitly convey her internal turmoil rather than get used as a therapy.
Then we had a wonderful session with Ms. Fahmida Manju majid, a London-based psychologist from Bangladesh. She uses story telling as a therapeutic tool to reach out to the amazing world of kid’s imagination, just where it blends perfectly with reality. Her stories work like magic by creating fantasy characters full of real emotions depicting the wonders of this world. She is thereby able to tickle the curiosity instinct in these kids, which also happens to be their foremost need. She has been conducting these sessions with splendid results among autistic kids & kids with sensory impairments. For her, art is a creation of beauty which has to touch the heart; & therapy is the bus-ride which doesn’t cure but takes the patient towards cure. Kids perceive everything as moving & so a story telling should incorporate that element; so she prefers to enact her tales in colorful costumes with lyrical narration.
The seminar ended by a tentative decision to design a training program which can initiate the process of having a group of trained art therapists who can positively assist in the betterment of emotional distress in mentally-ill people.
