It might surprise you that creativity can be an effective treatment for mental disorders. What do the creativity and psychotherapy? For patients it can be a means of self-expression and coping
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; work helps improve communication skills and to discover new aspects of their personality. In psychology, the use of creative activity for the treatment of various psychological disorders called art therapy.
In art therapy, psychotherapeutic techniques combined with the creative process, to thereby improve the patient's condition. The idea of such a treatment that helps a person to work to resolve the many conflicts and problems, including internal, self-esteem, learn more about themselves.
When I born art therapy?
Although thousands of years people have used art to express their emotions
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and share ideas as well as to treat the mind, art therapy began to be used in official medicine only in the mid-twentieth century. The doctors noticed that patients with a variety of mental disorders often express themselves through drawing and other forms of art, and this prompted them to turn the idea into the creativity of the therapeutic strategy. Since then, art therapy has become one of the important directions in psychology and psychotherapy.
When using art therapy?
Art therapy can be used to treat a variety of disorders that fall under the competence not only of psychologists and psychotherapists, and psychiatrists. It is often used in combination with psychotherapy techniques such as group therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy. Here are just a few examples of possible use of art therapy:
Children with learning disabilities
- Adults experiencing severe emotional stress
- Children with behavioral and social problems at school and at home
- People with mental disorders
- People with brain injuries
- Children and adults who have experienced traumatic events
Art therapy is also used for the adaptation of cancer patients - both for those who have suffered a serious operation, and for those undergoing therapy to at any time to maintain an acceptable quality of life. This helps them regain a sense of their own identity, no longer identify with the disease, which often occurs in patients with advanced cancers.
How does art therapy?
People suffering from depression
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, Increased anxiety
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, Domestic violence and other problems are invited to express themselves - their views, illness, attitude - through drawing, sculpture, music and so on. External Unlike sessions of art therapy from the usual lesson to the school of art is, first of all, that the patients in his work does not have to follow any rules - think about the proportions, the laws of perspective, color combinations, light and shadow, and so on . Their main task - to express what is going on inside them, and it can be done well or badly. The only score for this work - a therapeutic effect.
Deeper and imperceptible eye feature art therapy is that it frees people from the need to express their feelings in words as in conventional psychotherapy. Drawing and music is much less than are conventional than words, and more flexible. In addition, since many social problems arise as a result of human verbal communication, it is often useful to express the complexity of the non-verbally than to resort again to the words that have already caused problems. In other words, art therapy liberates man, allowing him to be more flexible and wide to look at yourself and the world around. Of course, this is only one of its effects.
Then, depending on the approach the therapist uses a different method of analysis of the results of creativity. The analysis in this case - a very complex and delicate area in which can not be definitely true methods and accurate answers. The analysis process in fact - it is also creativity, and it is always unique as every patient is unique.