by Rod Zinkel

Created on: July 07, 2010

Art Cart Offers Patients Their Own Way to Heal.

 At a hospital in Green Bay, Wisconsin, volunteers take an art cart around to patients. The volunteers offer from the cart art supplies, crafts, and entertainments, free of charge. These include paints, clay, pencils and sketch pads, journals, cross-stitch patterns, some scrapbook items, playing cards and word puzzle books. The cart is funded by the hospital in recognition that arts can help patients to be active in their healing.

 It is widely recognized that arts can be therapeutic, but as medical facilities face tight budgets during a difficult economic time, it is not practical to have an art therapist on staff, except at the largest of facilities. But with a few volunteers and a little funding, whether from the company or the public, some opportunities for patients to find out the therapeutic effects for themselves may be offered.

 There are several ways that art may help the patient. The first, and most obvious, is the project may provide a diversion. If the patient is preoccupied with their condition, it may worsen, as stress only adds to it. Art may occupy the mind to the extent that they overlook their condition, or, at least, make them less aware of time spent in the current condition. When drawing or painting it is easy to spend three hours on a piece, without watching the clock.

 Secondly, the arts 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 express, 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 other may understand. Art turns emotion into symbolism. Such a translation may lead to observing the condition from multiple perspectives. The arts emphasize imagery, and the expression in imagery prompts the artist to think of the significance of those images, perhaps to realize it. This realization helps to deal with the event.

 This sort of epiphany that every artist hopes for is how art may serve the patient in the most significant way. It may be shocking or soothing for the patient, but it is important to express both, at least for themselves. Creativity from this experience is a way to put it into some kind of order. As Robert Frost said of poetry, it is a way to make order of chaos.

 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 something is created of the experience, even if it is an expression of fear or despair, the artist makes something that could not exist by any other means. Even the painful experience is part of the patient’s unique perspective, and art can be the unique expression of it.    

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