19 September 2007 19:04

Art Therapy Project

For the last two years the Ukraine 3000 International Charitable Fund has been rendering financial aid to the art therapy studio working at the Children’s Department of the Oncology Institute at the Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine. The art therapy lessons have brought positive results and feedback from the hospital’s medical staff and administration, parents of the children treated at the department, and volunteer organizations working at the department. Children anticipate the art lessons as a pleasant break from the routine during their stay at the hospital.

By these reasons, the Fund has launched a new project, Art Therapy. It envisages working out a system of methods to introduce art therapy in children’s hospitals, organizing and conducting events to prepare art therapists to work at children’s hospitals, members of the Hospital to Hospital program, and supporting the creation and establishing art therapy groups.

The art therapy method is a modern efficient technique in the system of psychotherapeutic, prevention, rehabilitation, and other measures. Correcting the sick children’s psychophysical and emotional condition, fighting the problems related to their stay at the hospital (the isolation from the surrounding world, realization of their condition, fear of treatment and the future in general, loneliness and unprotectedness, parents’ unpreparedness to adequate perception of their child’s  psychological complications induced by the disease) are an important aspect of the treatment process.

In Ukraine, art therapy is an underdeveloped branch of the social support system. However, it has a long history in the world psychotherapy practice. It has formed as an independent psychotherapy practice in the 19402-1950s in Great Britain and the US.

The European Consortium for Arts Therapies Education (ECArTE) was formed in 1991 to work out and introduce general standards in art therapeutic education and professional practice. Its members are art therapy institutions in many European countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Russia, etc.) Unfortunately, none of the Ukrainian institutions has joined the Consortium so far. In 2003 the Art Therapy Association NGO was registered in Kyiv, developing, introducing, and conducting research on art therapy methods. It is the Fund’s partner in the Art Therapy project.

To extend art therapy method to all Ukraine’s hospitals, a universal set of methods is being worked out within the framework of the Art Therapy project, envisaging a system of organizational, technical, educational, and research steps:

• Organizing cooperation between hospitals’ management, charitable and volunteer organizations, and the state;
• Elaborating a system of financing permanent work of the art therapy studios;
• Organizational and technical measures (preparing and equipping rooms for the lessons, purchasing materials, etc.);
• Recruiting and estimating the psychological competency of the staff for the art therapy studios;
• Training the staff for the art therapy studios (working out and introducing a training course: workshops, seminars, etc);
• Educating the hospitals’ medical staff on the efficiency of art therapy;
• Researching the effect of the art therapy studios (keeping logs, observing the patients’ psychoemotional and clinical condition, etc);
• Organizing and conducting art show-reports of the art therapy studios.

As a result of the art therapy support, the little patients will obtain new educational possibilities on both the cognitive and practical level, get a positive experience, overcome the isolation, and experience vivid emotions.