How Art Therapy Can Help Children with Mental and Emotional Challenges

Tomorrow, May 7 is National Children's Mental Health Awareness Day, a day meant to raise awareness of the many children, youth, and young adults throughout the world  facing emotional and mental health challenges. This year marks the 11th anniversary of the commemorative day, and various facilities around the country will celebrate accordingly, with family activities, symposiums, lectures, youth rallies and making art.

Yes, making art. Art therapy, a quickly growing field combining psychotherapy with art media, provides comfort and hope to young people facing a diverse range of challenges, from childhood neglect to the loss of a loved one. The biggest advantage is that art can express things that are not expressible verbally & that's a huge advantage for people who don't have the language to talk about what's inside of them.

Children often fall into this category.

Art Therapy

In honor of Children's Mental Health Awareness Day, a friend & budding journalist interviewed me about art therapy to understand a little more about what I do. Here is the write up:

Heidi primarily works with children and adolescents and began her career in the field as the Founder of Heart Expression Art Therapy & Counselling, which offers both individual and group Counseling, Art Therapy & Sandplay Therapy sessions.

Heidi specializes in working with children as young as 5 offering individual counselling sessions. She also runs holiday programs such as creative art workshops with a focus on creativity and self-expression. Later she developed and implemented a clinical art therapy program for women., with various themes from depression and anxiety, grief and loss, to relationship challenges and coping with difficult life transitions. She has also worked with adolescent females around body image and self-esteem. Most recently, Heidi became a Certified Masters graduate (Counselling) from LaTrobe University where she completed her work placement at Gandel Besen House, a private primary school for children aged 3-8 year olds.

I spoke to Heidi about her career path and the particulars of working with a younger set of art therapy clients.

What is a mandala?

"Working within the containment of a circle or mandala often can be centering and provide a calm space for self-discovery. Using magazine photo collage as a material of choice can be a non-threatening approach to encourage teens to explore their feelings, thoughts, and values without anxiety about drawing skills."

For starters, how do you define art therapy?

I define art therapy as the psychological use of art media and the creative process, facilitated by an art therapist, to help foster self expression, create coping skills, and strengthen sense of self. Using the artistic process to help people explore different challenges and things they're facing in their life.

How did you become involved with the field?

I've always been involved in art, since I was a little girl. In high school I became interested in mental health and psychology. At University I started to explore more of the psychology field whilst still creating my own art. I had been working with children and teenagers whilst at University, where I was very fortunate to have been able to study psychology as a major in my undergraduate degree. Combining my love of the practice of art and psychology, and getting to help people in need, it was a perfect fit for me. After that I got a Diploma in Art Therapy and a postgraduate Masters degree in Counselling psychology.

How important is safety in your work?

"Re-establishing safety is an essential component to working with youth who have experienced trauma and loss. Creating spaces and places where a child feels safe or to depicts what safety looks like to him/her not only helps foster protection and security through the art, but allows for empowerment and a sense of control over this environment. Being able to allow my clients to explore what it means to have a safe home for a child who had been exposed to family violence is an incredibly valuable and powerful experience."

How did you get started working with children?

I had some experience as an undergrad doing volunteer placements with young people. I had envisioned myself back then working only with children but over the last few years I have really loved working with parents too as they are integral in the family unit as a whole.

Did you end up enjoying the experience?

I love working with children and adolescents a lot. They're a challenge. It's just a natural expression for kids to use art which is a joyful experience.. That creativity is very freeing and the imagination is so open at that age. It lends itself so well to the therapeutic process and making art. I love their energy and the inspiration that they bring.

You use mask making with your clients a lot. Why is that?

"Mask making can offer a powerful way to safely externalize emotional states that a child is experiencing. In response to exploring a feeling that sometimes remains bottled up inside; painting or creating a mask can reveal and identify many feelings difficult to describe in words."

What kinds of challenges are the children you're working with facing?

In the past I've worked with children in the school system. There are many behavioral and emotional needs that stemmed from early childhood abandonment or neglect. A lot of times their parents weren't able to take care of them. I then became motivated to focus more on attachment theory in my work, reparenting and offering them a consistent adult role model.

What type of clients have you worked with & who do you work with now?

From there I started to work with children who had challenges with emotion regulation, those who have bullied or been bullied, others  feeling isolated or some who have experienced a loss or death of a loved one, whether through illness or suicide or homicide or accident. Working with children really taught me a lot about how art can be used to heal wounds. Currently I work with children who have difficulties making friends, who lack age appropriate social skills and empathy. I help them strengthen themselves and become more confident about who they are.

What does an art therapy session with you look like?

I do a lot of individual sessions and some group art therapy. I feel the group work really gives children a sense that they're not alone. They're not the only kids who are experiencing these reactions or these responses to the painful things that happened to them. A lot of the job is planning which activities would be most helpful at approaching certain problems.

What activities have you found to be most beneficial?

I like to focus on interventions that will provide safety or reestablish safety for my client. That's really important to gain trust. That sometimes leads to working with spaces of containment, symbolically, or through the metaphor of art.

Also, looking at their own physical responses, their bodies' reactions to trauma or whatever difficulties they are experiencing. Maybe they have stomach aches or headaches or trouble breathing. Using the art to help show that, so they can be more connected to how their bodies are responding, and then explore ways of coping through the art to help with those responses.

So art that focuses on self-regulation or soothing or relaxation, through painting or drawing, mask making or things like that. Also using art intervention themes that focus on things like sadness, pain, worry, fear, anger. With these kinds of threatening feelings, it's often easier to explore them through art, than to talk about them verbally.

art therapy

What advantages, in your opinion, does art therapy provide children over other types of counseling or treatment?

Art making is a natural expression for children. They're very open and ready to engage with it. It really helps build that sense of self and emotional expression. Giving them that at a young age, hopefully while they're still in childhood, will hopefully help them be stronger as they move through adolescence and into adulthood, and be more able to develop those coping skills. There's that innate, imaginative ability that's not so censored in them yet. Adults often say, "I can't draw," which isn't important -- art therapy is about the process, not the product -- but it's nice to work with kids who don't have that anxiety.

What kind of progress have you witnessed in your time working with children?

I've definitely seen the process come full circle. Changes can also be seen within the art that a feeling -- such as worry, anger, or sadness -- is not as consuming as it was depicted before, or the child's sense of self and their ability to cope has strengthened. Art therapy can be a helpful intervention for stabilizing overwhelming emotional states and crisis situations because of the safe containment it provides.

Can you talk a little about the meaning and importance of Children's Mental Health Day?

This year is actually the 11th anniversary, so Children's Mental Health Day has been going on for a while. I think it's very helpful to have a day spotlighting children's mental health. It fosters a sense of hope for recovery and builds resilience for these issues. It also raises awareness to help with prevention and early intervention, helping children to be less at risk for mental health issues. The day also helps to take away the stigma attached to mental illness, getting that out of there early on and getting children more aware of the mental health needs that they may have.

This article was edited by a Victorian journalist who interviewed Heidi based on an article written by a Huffington post editor. Original content from interview with Gretchen Miller. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/07/art-therapy-children_n_7113324.html