Art Therapy Essay (Essay Sample)

Art Therapy Essay Student’s Name Course Professor’s Name Major Date Art Therapy Essay Diagnosis Mira lost her parents in a car crash a few weeks prior to being referred to my healthcare facility by a friend who was concerned with her mental state. She was a 24-year-old Asian studying at the University of Texas. According to her friend, Mira was passionate about the corporate world and even majored in business management but had registered a disturbing pattern of truancy, sadness, and a preference for isolation in the past few weeks. This new pattern concerned her friend who describes it as "Mira not being herself" as she is "usually a cheerful and outgoing character". Her friend also informed me that since the tragic event, Mira had always appeared "distant, deep in thought, and unpredictable to her" despite their 12-year-long friendship. Currently, she lives with her aunt who works a 9 to 5 and therefore, has little time to tend to her niece. A clear deduction from Mira's profile reveals that she only began registering the described pattern after the sudden loss of her parents in the crash. This is understandable as grieving is healthy for her wellbeing. I have come to understand that long-term bereavement has been widely documented to unleash costly ramifications to the patient's ability to cope with their lives. This condition of long-term grief that gets to unhealthy, destructive levels has been described as prolonged grief disorder. Prolonged grief disorder comes at a great cost such as posing a threat to life if proper intervention is not deployed and the proven ability to undermine the quality of life. In my assessment, Mira’s condition fits squarely within the clinical definition of prolonged grief disorder as she has exuded such distinctive characteristics as disruptive identity and intense emotional pain. All this information was provided by Mira’s friend as Mira was silent during the entire orientation session. With this information, I booked her for inpatient treatment, ready to begin her recovery process. Preparation Prior to the initial sessions, after getting a call from Mira's friend, I had made important preparations that would set the pace for meaningful interaction with her. In line with pre-existing recommendations in CBT literature, I had prepared to introduce Mira to images that would help her develop an expressive attitude and disclose information about her coping ideas and mental condition. CBT literature widely recommends the introduction of visual images in the therapy session as early as possible so that the client is familiarized with this method of communication (Yang, Li, & Sun, 2020). As such, much of the preparatory stages involved drawing representative images that are associated with grief, sorrow, depression, and lack of hope. This would help deploy the CBT-informed intervention because CBT in its essence, is highly reliant on effective collaboration between the client and the therapist, and is also action-based thus requiring the client to invest sufficient time and effort in the process of recovery. Mira’s response to the invitation to draw In our subsequent interaction, that is, the first treatment session, Mira was silent for most of the period. She also visibly tried her best to avoid eye contact with the therapist and preferred to concentrate on her phone. Her friend, who joined the session on her request, urged her to greet me on the hand but she was hesitant and only mumbled a soft hello which was inaudible. With continued interaction, later on, I gathered that she seemed excited and fixated on some of the painting materials in the office. I also learned that Mira was, in fact, a learning artist and even had a journal for her drawings but did not consider herself a great artist. To this point, I had opted to pursue traditional Cognitive Behavioral Therapy approaches in Mira's treatment and only use art therapy as an adjunct to the primary intervention. This new insight about Mira's interest in art, however, changed the course of our interaction as it offered a great opportunity to easily initiate a conversation and deploy the intervention using visual therapy. With a shy smile, I asked Mira if we could explore her painting abilities to which she agreed reluctantly. I gathered that the positive response was possibly in the conviction that she would have less time interacting with me, confirming an acute preference for isolation in alignment with her friend's report. Observation about how the individual responded to the art-making experience In line with my promise to exploit her artistic abilities, the first session involved assessing her artistic abilities by looking at some of the creations she had already completed in her journal. The journal was an insightful piece in the deployment of the intervention as it provided a summative review of her artistic capabilities. All of these works, were, however, created before the death of her parents. They featured expressive pieces, majorly painted with bright colors. They were also imbued with a sense of stability, harmony, peace, and contentment with life. Most of the art forms featured mandala images with erect triangles, suggesting a strong base for stability, and smooth, wavy lines to represent a seamless and exciting life. Overall, the creations suggested a sense of stability in Mira's life whether in education, life, and even friendship. Although most of the art forms, especially those in the initial pages of her drawing journal, were drawn with limited mastery, they provided just sufficient information that a viewer could leverage to make accurate deductions about her life. In our subsequent session, having assessed Mira’s ability to draw and paint, I sought to introduce her to a new concept, active imagination. The intention was to guide Mira to develop the capability to familiarize herself with the archetypical images of herself and visualize her collective psyche that represents how she feels in the present. This way, she would be able to develop a deeper understanding of her changing individuality in light of the loss of her parents and hopefully help in the restoration of her mental health. Having established rapport in the previous sessions, especially by capitalizing on her desire to grow her artistic potential, I then challenged her to learn the technique of active imagination and create drawings of what she felt and the collective psyche of her archetypal self on paper. I challenged her to respond to the question; how can you describe your life through a drawing in the past few weeks? She took the challenge with great psyche and in our next session, submitted a surreal, expressive image which she titled “Chaos” (Figure 1). Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 1 CHAOS The image features insightful inscriptions that may help make accurate deductions about Mira's life at the time of the intervention. One of the outstanding features of the painting is its use of red paint on the right side and blue paint that cuts through most of the right region. I like to think of the painting as a continuum of a chain of events that happened soon after Mira lost her parents and not as a representation of her most current status. Generally speaking, the color blue is associated with feelings of tranquility and peace in a person's life. In our latter years, blue areas may provide us with therapeutic benefits. However, it has also been associated with grief and sadness and this is the case in this context. As such, the blue color, being on the left, suggests that she tried to cope with grief in the first few weeks hoping it would end but as of today, the grief has worsened and she can't try anymore hence the bold red paint on the far right to represent total confusion and despair. The blue brush is also not uniform in strength and may suggest that Mira tried to cope several times, trying different methods before the situation got out of hand. A Zig Zag line can also be seen to cut through the canvas, beginning from the top left, extending to the base of the canvas, and then advancing to cover much of the center region of the painting. A key detail in the drawing of the Zig Zag line suggests that at the beginning of the continuum, the line is almost smooth but becomes sharper and more unstable as it advances toward the center of the canvas. Mira possibly intensifies the Zig Zag line across the continuum to represent increasing tension in her life, suggesting that her coping ideas were not fruitful. The use of zig-zag lines also works to imbue the painting with a sense of instability in the most recent period. Mandala images are also a distinct...