Case for Creative Arts Therapy, The

(This story appeared in High Performance #75, Spring 1997.)

The last issue of High Performance on Arts-in-Healthcare highlighted some excellent examples of projects utilizing the arts in various traditional and non-traditional healthcare programs. I applaud the attention to this area of community arts work. I was incensed, however, about one important issue: that the work of those most familiar with arts in healthcare—creative arts therapists—is mentioned only in passing. I think this reflects two related problems: the artists' lack of awareness of the work of their colleagues in arts therapy, and the concern of arts therapists for licensure within the tightly hierarchical healthcare profession.

First, to readers in the arts communities: many arts therapists—visual arts, drama, music, movement/dance, poetry—are respected creative artists who continue to work and perform, exhibit, display and publish despite their work with an awesome range of clients in hospitals, long-term care facilities, correctional institutions, psychiatric in- and out-patient programs, youth-at-risk projects. At some point, their concern with the creative process and with the place of arts in their communities led them to work beyond their own self-expression; to find ways to share the power of arts in their lives with marginalized and abused people—those labeled sick or sociopathic or mentally ill. The tools of arts therapy are the familiar techniques of deepening creativity, adapted to situations where the creative impulse is deeply repressed by extreme versions of the same conditions that lead many of you to read High Performance. Arts therapists are often licensed, have worked under clinical supervision, and have trained in circumstances and environments that are largely hidden from mainstream attention. Their work is physically and emotionally draining, frustrated by rigid bureaucracies, lack of funding and disdain from their administrations. Yet they persist, because of the remarkable effectiveness of their work despite these negative factors.

Within the medical megalith, licensure and credentialing are the keys to administrative and economic power. Working in these settings, arts therapists have been concerned to show that their professions are rigorous in training practitioners who can earn the respect of the MDs and PhDs. Their professional organizations, seven of whom are represented in the National Creative Arts Therapies Association (NCATA), variously require Master's degrees, 4,000 to 6,000 hours of clinical supervision, and continuing education credits, similar to degrees such as a Master's in Social Work, whose holders can earn third-party reimbursement (medical insurance) under certain circumstances. To earn the respect of the medical power elite, arts therapists have occasionally resisted involvement in or blocked implementation of programs in which "untrained" or unlicensed artists have tried to work in healthcare. This may have deepened some of their separation from the activist arts community.

Next, to arts therapists: I'm writing as a fan of your work, not as a practitioner. I am a Brechtian who believes that the arts are essential to radical societal change. I also believe that personal change is essential to community change. Having seen the work of drama therapists, psychodramatists and movement therapists, I feel your skill and knowledge are essential to arts activism. I deeply respect the work you are doing, often in gulag-like conditions with clients most of us would rather forget—since they represent most dramatically how we have been failed by our families, our schools, our governments, our health experts. AND I feel that the medical model, which you have been trying to live up to, has failed you; you continue to be marginalized within your institutions, only now the power brokers are the czars of managed care. You need to work hard to make your work known to the world, to form alliances with other activists, to begin to bring your skills into response teams that can address inter-group violence, human fallout from the corporate welfare state, bewilderment caused by the new communication technologies. You need to look to new models of health, beyond those you have licensed yourselves for.

Finally, to the readers of High Performance: We often set rigid boundaries and exclude people of certain labels. Artists disdain people who call themselves educators; academic educators disdain the political vocabularies of community activists; therapists see political change as beyond their scope, and anyone who uses the term "spiritual" finds numerous doors slammed. And still, we share the work of change and of awareness through creativity and communication. I hope that Art in the Public Interest can provide a forum by which we can bring our multiple intelligences and talents to the work we all see so clearly ahead of us.

Joel Plotkin works at a technical college in upstate New York. His Web Guide to Applied and Interactive Theater (http://csep.sunyit.edu/~joel/guide.html) is an effort to bring together those working for social, community, political and personal change through theater-based techniques. He travels freely among Boal practitioners, drama therapists and psychodramatists, with occasional visits to traditional academic theater programs.

This story originally appeared in High Performance #75, Spring 1997

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999