First published 3rd September 2023
One of the fellow potters that I meet up with occasionally at the #pottermanstudio used to be an art therapist.
She told me that she no longer works as an art therapist because there is no basis of evidence that art is therapeutic.
I’d come to the same conclusion myself, although am also now going to contradict myself because I do believe that art can be therapeutic. It just depends on a lot of other factors such as context, timing and the weight of influences going on in a person’s life and head at any one time.
When I was an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital back in the 90s, I went along to art classes in the hope of finding them helpful, but they made me feel much worse.
I had a degree in art and design, but in those classes I was only able to produce work that most 6-year-olds would be embarrassed about. At least, that was how I felt at the time.
Subsequently and periodically, I’ve gained some benefit from drawing – particularly life drawing – but I found more therapeutic benefit from smashing rocks with a sledgehammer when I worked as a volunteer on the Appalachian Trail (ATC). I’ve also found typing and other repetitive tasks – addressing and stuffing envelopes, for example – therapeutic, in different ways.
When I worked at a small publishing unit – part of the Longman publishing group – we used to send marketing mailshot work to the same psychiatric hospital that I stayed in myself a few years later. The stuffing of envelopes with marketing materials was deemed to be therapeutic for some of the patients, and, based on my own experience, I believe it probably was.
It isn’t just the stuffing of the envelopes – or whatever simple repetitive task it is that you are doing – it’s also the experience that you have while doing it. Stuffing envelopes alone is highly unlikely to be particularly therapeutic – although it may pay bills if you’re doing it to earn money – but in a supportive group environment it can be very calming.
I set something similar up in a Buddhist community that I stayed at for a while, after my breakdown, helping to raise funds for the community. We sat around a table in the Temple and it was very meditative, for a while at least.
When you’ve got a lot of inner turbulence going on, it’s hard to find something – anything – to settle on for any length of time. It’s important to keep looking for and finding whatever it is that gets you through, until the next time you have to start looking for and finding whatever it is that gets you through.
This brings me to one of my ‘Rules for Self-Management’ that I haven’t referred to for a while:
Rule No. 5: Don’t underestimate the therapeutic value of envelope stuffing (but don’t overestimate it either).
I’m glad I’m no longer envelope stuffing – either therapeutically or for a living – and am happy to be steadily working with clay in a creative way. This is therapeutic for me now, but it wasn’t before. A lot of other work needed to be done before it could be.
Glad About 