Environmental Medicine: Healing Through Creative Process

Abstract

Art therapy is an effective method of helping people - not only to recover from illness - but also to recognize how personal experiences affect oneself and others. Art therapy uses a combination of therapeutic reasoning and creative expression in order to decrease anxiety in an unconventional manner versus more traditional therapies including typical counseling or the use of medications. This hand-on approach helps those involved to better contextualize one's circumstance and environment through the immersion in the integrative, reparative and restorative process of making and creating which illustrates for the patient a process of release through expression. In this approach, the process takes precedent over the outcome, reinforcing the critical aspect of allowing one's intuition, connected to the subconscious and unconscious areas of the brain, to emerge what is invisible to us and make it visible.

As part of the foundation of art therapy, both patients and their therapists need appropriate environments to fully explore and leverage therapeutic processes. The patient requires an environment that empowers and encourages one to safely explore and examine uncomfortable emotions, memories, perhaps even traumatic experiences. This type of expression-based treatment differs from many other therapeutic approaches in that it strives to simulate the image-based region of the brain that arises early in one's development, and in which memories are contained. For those who struggle to communicate effectively through verbal other normative means, art therapy can be most effective - especially with adolescents, whose brains still have plasticity and have not yet fully developed. it is this researcher's hypothesis that supportive environments can assist patients in the articulation of difficult remembrances. Similarly, the art therapist's role in stimulating the memories of a patient requires an environment that helps to build and strengthen a trust-based rapport in order to most effectively assist the patient in acquiring the insight and skill necessary to successfully manage their behavior in the expanded environments that comprise their daily lives.

This paper explores the architectural aspects of adaptive healing environments that support the essential relationship between patient and therapist, and allows a patient to continuously progress through their unique prescribed program and eventually successfully navigate their daily lives. By fully understanding and documenting the atmospheric and phenomenal needs of both patient and therapist throughout the therapeutic process, the design of the architectural environment can be leveraged to augment the sensory and creative experiences central to a patient’s healing path.