Art is Good for your Health!

The Exeter born Elizabethan painter Nicholas Hilliard wrote of art that: ‘If men of worth did know what delight art breedeth, how it removeth melancholy, avoideth evil occasions, putteth passions of grief or sorrow away, cureth rage and shorteneth the times they would never leave it until they had attained in some good measure or more their comfort’
This is as true now as when Hilliard wrote these words in the sixteenth century. Art is good for your health! And that’s the principle that Southwest organisation Insider Art work with.
Exeter based Insider Art is a small group of artists, trainers and art therapists, who work to develop innovative, creative, ethical and informed good practice across the arts & health field. The codirectors, Malcolm Learmonth and Karen Huckvale, both have part time NHS posts, where art psychotherapy is a valued and recognised approach to mental health. The arts therapies are nationally regulated by the Health Professions Council. Surprisingly they are currently the only regulated approach to psychotherapy, though this is changing.
Arts psychotherapies are particularly helpful around emotional and psychological distress and disturbance. We all feel distressed and disturbed sometimes, it doesn’t necessarily make us ‘mentally ill’. What can help is working with our innate creative resourcefulness. C.G Jung wrote that ‘Problems are not solved: they are outgrown’ . Art making and psychotherapy are a powerful combination to nurture that growth.
The arts have a wider part to play in relation to health too: training health practitioners to think creatively; improving health care environments, and working with broad participation in art making are all arts based approaches to health. Insider Art contribute to numerous projects and have many years combined experience in health, education, arts and community settings. They believe Creativity is good for people! And that emotional and psychological intelligence are essential to good creative and health results.
Malcolm and Karen created Insider Art in 2001 to offer workshops, courses and an annual conference all aimed at stimulating arts and health work, sharing experience, developing dialogue, respect and understanding between people working within diverse aspects of arts and health practice.
Their courses are self contained trainings covering areas like: working with groups and different needs, understanding images as a psychological language, concepts of mental health, creativity, self esteem and emotional intelligence.

‘Art in Mental Health: An Art Therapy Foundation Course’:
This course, in its eleventh year, introduces participants to key factors in working with visual art on broad mental health issues. It is a grounding in Art Therapy principles but not an Art Therapy training,. It runs on Tuesday evenings over two eight week terms with four Saturday workshops. (64 taught hours) Participants include artists, teachers, health workers, and people who are just interested in this exciting field.

Arts & Health Course for Participatory Visual Arts
This practical course, focuses on the skills and knowledge required to develop art making in ethical, accountable and safe ways with young people and adults. It is informed by art therapy and emotional literacy perspectives and runs on 10, six hour, Friday sessions over an eight month period. (60 taught hours + 25 independent study hours) Participants have varied skills and interests and are already engaged in using participatory visual art in some form of health context. Those new to the field need to arrange work experience (voluntary or paid) in this area for the duration of the course.
Both courses are currently accepting applications. Student feedback is very positive:

“A brilliant course, really interesting.”
“I have a deeper understanding of the psychological and emotional implications of art making.”
“The most refreshing, nutritional brain food I’ve had for a very long time.”
“Because everyone spoke as human beings from their hearts and with conviction, it was real. Not a matter of ticking boxes and targets, which I’m so fed up with.”
“Insider Art tailor trainings to practitioners or groups providing a variety of professional development and staff training workshops, individual and group mentoring programmes.”

Recent work has included workshops with health care professionals seeking effective ways of engaging young children with art making; assisting community arts programmes to develop sensitive arts making workshops for people with mental health needs; enabling artists to explore and process personal material; offering talks, lectures and discussion groups about particular aspects of arts, health and therapy work. They have conference presentations coming up in Northampton and Berlin.
They also offer individual art psychotherapy, and supervision for other therapists. There is no better way of learning about the arts impact on health than to experience it.
See www.insiderart.org.uk for news, projects, course details and application forms, information about the Seventh Exeter Arts and Therapies Conference (EATc) There is Art in the Archive: Gallery and Show & Tell pages along with freely downloadable publications and articles. They are planning a new residential course but haven’t yet found a venue, so if anyone knows of an easily accessible Devon venue, sleeping 70 people which has space for both lectures and art making let them know!