What Is Art Therapy? • 33In fact, within a year of that initial program, an art therapist, a dance therapist, and a
clinical social worker had been hired to help the children and their parents. So the following
summer when parents were offered a six-week art therapy experience, with parallel groups
for them and their children as well as joint sessions, they were quick to sign up and par-
ticipated with the same kind of relief evident in the work with their children, in individual
pairs (E) and as a group (F).
Medical and Rehabilitation Settings
There is a similar kind of tension about roles and territory when artists-in-residence work
in hospitals or rehabilitation settings with the mentally or physically ill. In 1969 a New York
group named Hospital Audiences, Inc. (HAI), started bringing musical performances to
patients who could not attend concerts. Later, they offered activities in all art forms as well.
Their art workshops, seen on the DVD (G), are still available for those with chronic men-
tal illness and are offered by sensitive artist teachers. The organization, which continues
to do excellent work in bringing the arts to many who would otherwise not have access,
has extended its work to others for whom arts performances and activities are therapeutic,
such as youth at risk for violence in inner city schools and detention centers. Its mission,
to “inspire healing, growth and learning through engagement in the arts for the culturally
underserved,”^4 continues to be accomplished with ever-increasing support and outreach.
Fortunately, there is now an art therapist on the staff who can consult with and train those
artists and teachers working in the community. Some of the HAI artists are most impres-
sive (H).
On the Task Panel on the Role of the Arts in Therapy & Environment of the President’s
Commission on Mental Health in 1978 to which I consulted, there were deep philosophical
differences about how best to help troubled individuals through art. Several panel members
agreed with Joan Erikson, developer of an activities program at Austen Riggs, a residential
treatment center (J. Erikson, 1976). Erikson felt that artists and craftsmen were the best peo-
ple to bring creative activity to the mentally ill, arguing that using art as a form of therapy
interfered with its intrinsically healing power.
Figure 2.8 Susan Aach working with a blind child.