Art as Therapy

nina fides g.
Sep 5, 2020
4 min read

During my second year of high school, I asked my parents if I could transfer. I wanted to attend another school, isolated in one of the provinces in the Philippines, near a mountain. It was naïve of me to entertain the idea of living outside my parents’ house at 14, without knowing full well what it entails. I just knew that the school focused on the arts.

I disliked high school. I went to an all-girls Catholic school where I found the rules stifling. I was disinterested during classes, and I killed time by doodling on textbooks. This was much to my sister’s dismay when the books were handed down to her.

I was a testy teenager, and looking back, it was just me struggling to express myself. While art has been part of my identity, I only had an inkling of what it can mean for other people.

I understood it better when I came across a 2017 article by Quartz.com. “Google's most-searched “how-to” questions capture all the magic and struggle of being human.” When people google "how to draw," what they are searching for is, how can I cure my existential ennui?

I would often joke that art or drawing is something that has helped me because therapy is too expensive. Understandably, people have different ways of dealing with life, stress, or boredom, but can art be therapeutic?

Author Alain de Button shares in a video from his “School of Life” YouTube channel that culture can support our lives since institutionalized religion has been declining. Humans always had a need for spiritual experience. The author says that art can help with problems of the soul. There is a possibility that art can be approached as an option for our innermost problems, like vitamins for the soul or a salve for the ruminating mind.

Jason Silva, a futurist, explains in a podcast with Aubrey Marcus the difference between the artist and the neurotic. “They are both overwhelmed by the world, but the artist takes that in and reworks it into an active work project.”

There’s a story back in 2013 ABC News titled “Art Therapy Saves Schizophrenic Hit By Two Cars.” It tells an astonishing story of Robert Latchman miraculously surviving a terrible accident while crossing a street in New York City. As if that wasn’t devastating enough, Latchman also has learning disabilities and is schizophrenic. To help with this, Latchman has been in an art therapy program since at the age of 19 at the League Education & Treatment. After the accident, his whole body had to recover. His art community has helped him by providing supplies and support to aid him back to painting again.

I am reminded of this quote by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo who transformed her pain into beauty. She said, “I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”

My sister told me about a museum she and her husband recently visited at Hiroshima. A guy shared a painting to the Japanese broadcasting network (NHK) of what it was like to live through the atomic bomb. The broadcasting corporation started collecting more artworks in 1974 and exhibited the following year.

Created by Akiko Takakura. Image courtesy of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. From Vice.com

Vice.com recently covered a documentary called “The Bomb” depicting the horrors of nuclear warfare. The multi-media film featured the haunting paintings saying that it’s a testament to the power of visuals to tell a story.

Art can be a form of conveying a story or message which may be too difficult to tell.

A 2018 study from NIH, National Library of Medicine covers the topic of the “Effectiveness of Art Therapy with Adult Clients.” They tested with a variety of people. The groups were those with medical problems, mental health issues, and trauma. The researchers were surprised by cancer patients. Results showed that art therapy appears to “enhance their quality of life and ability to cope with psychological symptoms.”

Psychologist Carl Jung explains, “Often it is necessary to clarify vague content by giving it a visible form. This can be done by drawing, painting, or modeling. Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”

While this is no claim to say that art is the solution for everything, art does help with what it means to be alive and to connect to self and others. It is done through the expression of the human condition, both glorious and terrible.

My personal experiences and struggles are incomparable to the stories shared, but art has been a valuable help. I think it’s what some people seek too in little ways by googling “how to draw”, taking trips to art museums, or by buying adult colouring books. No wonder the latter is so popular.

The process of making art has helped make sense of personal experiences through visual interpretation. I’ve had moments where things became overwhelming, like when I first moved to a different country. For me, art has been therapeutic through transferring thoughts and emotions on paper without trying to understand everything. It allowed me to say things without really speaking.