Art Therapy

Excerpt

Palliative care medicine is the interprofessional subspecialty focused on relieving suffering and improving the quality of life in patients with serious illness as well as their families. Beyond the aspects of physical illness, palliative care -as defined by the World Health Organization- strives to implement “means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual.” Due to the intense emotional and existential nature of a life-limiting illness, patients are increasingly turning to alternative and complementary therapeutic modalities to cope and find relief. Art therapy is a clinical intervention that utilizes the expressive qualities of art-making to improve physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

As defined by the American Art Therapy Association (AATA) in About Art Therapy (2018), art therapy, as facilitated by a professional art therapist, is a therapeutic modality used over ongoing sessions to “improve cognitive and sensorimotor functions, foster self-esteem and self-awareness, cultivate emotional resilience, promote insight, enhance social skills, reduce and resolve conflicts and distress and advance societal and ecological change.” Creative art therapy has been used to assist patients and families in increasing self-awareness, ameliorating symptom burden, and adapting to the stressful life experiences associated with a terminal illness. When curative therapies are no longer viable in the terminally-ill patient, alternative remedies such as creative art interventions that can improve quality of life are invariably relevant in medical domains that focus on patient’s comfort such as palliative and hospice care.