230 • Introduction to Art Therapy
the world without excessive shame. In 2001, an artist donated her skills to families who had
lost members in the terrorist attacks, offering to make portraits of the person from a photo-
graph. You can see and hear her on the DVD telling why and how she did what she did (F).
During the Second World War, the Red Cross sent logbooks to Americans in prisoner of
war camps. The prisoners not only wrote in them, they also made drawings and paintings.
Creating images—of people and places they missed—was a way to hold onto good memo-
ries, and to relieve months or years of tension and boredom. On the DVD (G), you can see
and hear more about how helpful those logbooks were from some of the soldiers who cre-
ated in them (www.merkki.com/art.html).
The trauma of war does not disappear with the end of combat, but is often carried in the
mind and body in the form of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which affects civilians
as well as soldiers. Thirty years after an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a Japanese
TV station asked survivors of the attack to submit drawings of their memories. They were
astonished by the response, as hundreds of adults welcomed the opportunity to deal with
the still-painful trauma by creating images (H) (Japan Broadcasting Corporation, 1977).
Vietnam veterans, who suffered massive culture shock as well as the trauma of combat,
have been helped to heal through art therapy; their own art as self-therapy is on display at
the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago (www.nvvam.org). On their web-
site art therapy is cited as helping in their efforts to heal. You can hear some of them talk
about their art on the DVD (I).
Because of the nature of contemporary combat and the kinds of disabling injuries sol-
diers have suffered in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, PTSD is becoming tragically more
common. Making art is one way to achieve some control over the intrusive imagery of flash-
backs (Horowitz, 1983). In fact, art therapists at Veterans Administration hospitals, includ-
ing Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., have long helped veterans deal
with PTSD through art.
Figure 10.9 A concentration camp execution.