Creative Healing : How to Heal Yourself by Tapping Your Hidden Creativity

Authors Samuels and Lane advocate art as an adjunct to medical care; they encourage sterile, dry, humorless medical institutions to add to their ranks those people whose only task is help patients express their pain, sadness, wishes, joy, anxiety, happiness, or fear, not from any clinical base, but from a human, craetive space.

I work with patients on a regular basis, and I see how patients and families are eager to have us enter their rooms. How much joy is expressed when we encourage them to sing, dance, draw, paint, tell stories, write poetry. They are eager to participate, to make art, to dance from wheel chairs, and squish paint together between pieces of colored paper, to write poetry. You have only to read the messages on the tile wall in the lobby and the healing ceiling tiles to know how important simple creative acts are to people with life-threatening illness.

Nurses and doctors invite us to visit particular patients. We offer creative breaks for hospital staff and welcome diversions for patient's families who spend long hours in the hospital often far away from home.

These stories may seem unbelievable, but I see amazing things happen every day I am at the hospital. Is it too good to be true? Nope. The synergy of art and healing is a surprise for anyone who embarks on the effort, not as a job, but as a gift.

Rather than laying claim to a concept, Lane and Samuels are spreading the word. It is past time for hospitals and medical institutions to integrate art into the healing environment. Healing is more than a result of medical attention, it's a result of attention to the whole body, mind, and spirit.

As far as the! comments about erroneous anthropology, one as only to read the great controversies within that discipline itself to know that there are already a variety of opinions on the subject. Science is even beginning to rethink evolution! And what about those flying dinosaurs? I think the past is open to speculation and I support those who are creative enough to view the world with an open mind.

Creative Healing has a wealth of information about creating personal art and about bringing art into medical settings. It's a do-it-yourself manual, complete with exercises, ideas, and experiences. I applaud the authors' efforts and look forward to hearing stories from other writers who have pioneered these concepts. The more that is written, the more likely those in charge of planning and designing hosptials will realize that an art room is as important as an operating room.

However, I found the language and tone of this book a bit far-fetched. While I believe in the message this book conveys, its glittering generalities spoil the overall content. The authors seem to want the reader that they have discovered some new form of healing, even say that it is just emerging and "being born"; later they contradict themselves, saying art as healing has been around since the dawn of history. This is not a new field and many others have talked about the use of art in healing for many decades, including expressive arts therapists and the work of Rudolph Steiner quite early in the 20th century.

However, I am most disturbed by the message that everyone will heal from becoming involved in art or working with a healing artist. Again, while I believe in the power of arts (and also alternative aand conventional medicine) to heal, the message of this book would have been more strong if the authors had infused their broad experiences in health care with their observations (if only to be ethical with an audience of physically ill and often desparate, people who may be reading the book with hope for recovery and extended life). There are too many contradictions in what the authors state (that healing arts are not therapy when it seems that all the cases demonstrate how therapeutic the arts are, that there is no concern for finding meaning when throughout they talk about finding meaning aka: interpretation of art), Yes the arts are difficult to classify and is certainly difficult to research, but some attempt could be made to get things straight. Als! o the use of the term "art" to cover all the arts is very confusing (it seems the authors do not have fine arts backgrounds other wise they would have been more sensitive to this) and the exercises are vague and would be difficult for many of my patients to follow without more specifics. If a person is truly looking for some books which will help guide them in their search for how to use art as healing, I recommend Pat Allen's Art is a Way of Knowing and Shaun McNiff's Trust the Process; these are by two authors who seem to have a grasp of the real essentials of art for healing and growth.

The authors also convey the message that "healing artists" can help you to overcome your distress, illness, and other woes. They also assert that "Making healing art is easy. Anyone can heal himself or herself with art." Again, I agree with the premise-- art has been important in my life as a healing force-- but there have been well-trained guides and facilitators along the way, too (usually in the form of people like Samuels and Rockwell who has professional training in working within healthcare). While I am sure many compassionate, socially-minded and caring artists are out there, as a psychotherapist as well as an artist, I would be a bit more cautious about telling people they need a "healing artist" to help solve a depression or trauma. And although "art heals," it is a bit of a stretch to say that anyone can heal himself with art and that the process is easy. Anyone who has tried to help someone change, transform, or emotionally repair someone (through traditional or non-traditional medicine, psychotherapy, or any other healing art form), or who has had to overcome trauma! or crisis in his or her life knows that this process of reparation (whether is be body, soul, or psyche)is not at all easy or foolproof.

The book's strong points are artists' examples of healing arts. The weakess point, however, comes across throughout-- that the authors are not as deeply connected to the healing arts as the artists they speak of. It seems that they found a "gold mine" through gathering all these stories into one book. They are to be commended for collecting some many wonderful stories about these artists and it is these stories which convey the essence of why art helps and heals in certaingnore the snake oil in cases. If the reader can focus on these stories this is a book worth reading.

But that's a far cry from the sweeping claim of the authors that"Art heals you, and it heals others, and it heals the earth" (p.38).How can we know that arts healing does all the marvelous things that the authors claim, any better then, say, eating chicken soup or watching TV or playing chess?This question is made more difficult to answer by the fact that "healing" is never defined. In some places, it is treated as a behavior, like praying or making art, all reported to have the same physiological attributes (p.1). In still others, it is treated as a belief system, a treatment, and even a cure for illness (pp.7, 275). So it's hard to pin down just what the authors meanwhen they say that art is "healing" or to know if it "works."

The authors present a host of sweeping claims, but little evidence, that this is a book about "conquering illness" (p.2) The evidence presented consists largely of anecdotal data which, of course, present only individual successes, never failures, or of studies done in fields other than the arts. The authors brush aside the need for proof. "Do we need proof," they ask (p.97) "that the soul exists to use that word, or that God exists to pray?" Yet they refer to their "medically proven" technique (p.2) with which "we believe that many people have cured themselves of cancer, AIDS and depression"(p.7)

In fact, there is constant reference to research. The book cites work done by investigators like Dr. Herbert Benson, who found that meditation and prayer lowered blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing rate as evidence that art works the same way, although Benson never mentioned art. Nor do the authors refer to the fact that Benson found that the repetitive use of nonsense words had the same effect as "spritual" activities like praying or meditating.

Neither Benson nor Noman Cousins (who found that humor aids in recuperation) makes the kind of lofty claims that appear in this book. Nor did Dr. William Fry or Dr. Steve Allen (son of the comedian) with whom I shared a platform at the National Library of Medicine of the NIH on the subject of The Medicinal Muses.

The traditional way of finding if a program is accomplishing what we want it to accomplish is to conduct an outcome study, comparing people in this program with those who have had other experiences, other treatments, or no attention at all.

But the authors make it clear (p.32) that they are not intested in "outcome measurement other than the patient's experience of the process as being meaningful.Fair enough, but there are many ways of comparing patients' attitudes and perceptions of the experience of art with their perceptions of the meaningfulness of reading a book, or talking with visitors, or looking at flowers, or eating ice cream from the ward refrigerator, or even with the laying on of hands.

Without defining what the program is supposed to be doing, we can't validate it. And without outcome measures, how can we distinguish between healing triumphs and specious travesties? How can we know the difference between significant recovery and the feel-good results of the Hawthorne effect? Or of a stiff martini?

It's just these kinds of exaggerated and unsupported claims by some arts therapists that motivated my dance therapist wife and me to spend five years of research on our book The Art and Science of Evaluation in the Arts Therapies: How Do You Know What's Working?, in which we wrote: "Increasing numbers of . . .nonverbal therapists have come to accept the need for more than faith, zeal and anecdotal reports of cures in considering the effectiveness of their work."

But, contend the authors, they do accept the need for research. However, their concept of research is interesting. They write: "Research needs to be done qualitatively and quantitatively to determine HOW [not if] art heals. More research needs to be done to DEMONSTRATE THAT [not verify if]art improves the quality of life, reduces symptoms, and relieves pain. Important research needs to be done TO DEMONSTATE THAT [not verify if] art lengthens the lives of people with life-treatening illness and THAT {not if] it cures illness" (p.275)

Art these the words of an investigator or of an evangelist?

The authors distinguish between art in healing and the arts therapies (their understanding of which is seriously deficient, except for the fact that the practice of arts therapies requires training). In their comparison, they reject the need for training, and they state: "Currently, we believe that there is no need for licenses to certify artists in art and healing. The only license you need to be with another human being in a time of suffering is to be human, to be present, and to have the intention to be healing" (p.32).

In view of this clear distinction, it's puzzling that the home institution of one of the authors is offering both at the University of Florida and at a local community college, an art-in-medicine certificate program to promote "career options" for artists. While the physiological and psychological benefits of laughter have been well documented, the proponents of humor in healing would probably consider it a joke to suggest a certificate program in telling jokes in hospitals.

One may also wonder, in light of their clear distinction between art therapy and art healing, why an article in The Gainesville Sun, with no attribution other than "Special to the Sun" (which usually means that the article was submitted by an unamed outside source) describes the artists as "therapists," and why the program co-director (and the co-author of this book)refers to the program as "a complementary therapy."