Broken Crayons Still Colour

My journey with visual art therapy began three years ago during a workshop when I first met Susan Bolluogh Khare, a strong advocate of person-centred art therapy. Her exhibition in Pune on The Therapeutic Value of Art showcases the role of creative art in the therapeutic process.

One’s expression through art is used to address both psychological and emotional needs of the person in visual art therapy. According to Khare, it is the artistic process that is more important than the final product. Visual art therapy uses art as a medium for expressing oneself through a creative process on the path toward self-awareness. According to Cathy A. Malchiodi in her book Expressive Therapies (2005), art therapy uses traditional psychotherapy and its techniques in union with the creative process to improve one’s psychological health and wellbeing.

During her workshops, Khare urges participants to explore the art medium slowly in the beginning, by letting them to express their feelings through lines and colours. Subsequently through active imagination or the introduction of themes, art therapists like Khare help clients explore emotions like fear, anger, and sadness to get in touch with their senses. Extending emotions to cognition, Lusebrink (2004) explored the relationship between art expression and functions of the brain. The sensory processes involved while making art activates different brain regions, and the expression of art stimulates the kinaesthetic and visual senses in the brain before processing the information through cognition. By letting clients evince themselves through art, they may come to terms with difficult thoughts or feelings that may be at the root of their problems and explore ways to cope with them.

As an art therapist, one is skilled to identify the nonverbal representations and analogies that are communicated through the art form, which might not be as easily expressed in words. Riley (2001) has also shown that many adolescents are more comfortable expressing themselves with visual art than talking about their feelings. Khare emphasizes on the interpretation of the art by the person, who gives it meaning, as opposed to the therapist explaining the piece as followed in traditional projective techniques.

Art as therapy can be employed as a clinical intervention and is effective in treating a variety of symptoms in diverse populations. Creating art as a process in the therapeutic environment offers opportunities for counsellors to build relationships with the client and explore areas that arise from the client’s artwork. The integration of art therapy and solution-focused treatment has proved effective for substance abuse as it blends cognitive and perceptual strategies (Matto, Corcoran & Fassler, 2003). Research by Northwestern Memorial Hospital (2006), found that art therapy allows cancer patients to focus on something positive and gives them something they can control. Thus the process involved in making art is not only therapeutic but helps improve their quality of life and boosts their abilities to cope with stress.

Chapman et al. (2001) found that children receiving art therapy treatment experienced a reduction in acute stress symptoms and Gussak (2009) showed that art therapy greatly improved the mood of inmates by helping them shift to an internal locus of control. Creating art together brings a different synergy to a group and provides the therapist with insight into group dynamics. As prolific as art therapy is in groups, it can also be effectively used in a one-on-one format for personal development, self-exploration, and an in-depth understanding of one’s persona.

Pablo Picasso once said that “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” According to Khare, only when we are comfortable working with art as a medium and have explored our personal issues through art, will we be able to effectively work with others. Art therapy is truly an opportunity to explore oneself and develop skills of acceptance and empathy for the people with whom we interact in our daily lives.  

Nikita D'Souza

Self-Care: The Vanquisher of Distress

“The heart pumps blood to itself, before the rest of the body.”

In the previous blog, we discussed self-care and how it ought to be made essential for a practicing psychologist. Self-care is defined as the behaviours and actions taken to increase one’s mental and physical well-being and resilience. Self-care helps in increasing a therapist’s competence as it models healthy behaviour for the client, enhances self-esteem and confidence, expands the therapist’s reservoir of empathy, and reduces the occupational hazards of compassion fatigue, emotional burnout, and vicarious trauma. Self-care is not a voodoo science. Extensive research has shown that self-care improves attention, immune functioning, self-esteem, empathy, and counselling skills (Schure, Christopher, & Christopher, 2008; Shapiro, Brown, & Biegel, 2007).

Empathy and vulnerability form the basis of self-care. These terms are often used casually in conversations, yet one may have failed to understand them. Wiseman (1996) classified empathy into four crucial parts. Empathy is built upon the cornerstones of perspective taking, non-judgementality, emotional recognition or understanding another’s feelings, and communication of the understanding. A therapist ought to apply the same concepts to themselves; for instance, they must not judge their own thoughts and feelings. A competent therapist would have to recognize their own emotions and communicate this understanding to their conscious mind. Empathy can’t be limited to clients only but has to be extended to therapists themselves. Empathize with your body, empathize with your brain, and empathize with your own depleting empathy.

Vulnerability is a vital part of self-care. Brene Brown, one of the pioneers in research on vulnerability, says that “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.” She found that embracing one’s vulnerability and breaking the power of shame helps people in forming connections and fostering self-growth. Therapists should not see themselves as all-mighty superheroes. Accept your vulnerability, acknowledge your limits, and don’t be ashamed of seeking help when needed.

Hence, a self-care regime should involve practices that help you empathize with yourself and cultivate acceptance of your vulnerability. There is no one correct method of self-care. It can be tailored to your own interests and needs. Practicing mindfulness, exercising, practicing yoga, walking, reading, listening to music, or even watching trashy reality TV can be a form of self-care. I have had a colleague tell me that she would take 30 minute nap every day in order to reenergize herself. A therapist should also seek supervision as it acts as a constant source of support. Often a supervisor would be able to spot the signs of compassion fatigue or emotional burnout in a therapist and would prevent him/her from falling down the rabbit hole.

You must have surely noticed how vital self-care is, as well as how easy it is to practice. However, one of the common barriers to self-care is lack of knowledge. It is not an aspect of formal training. There might be PowerPoint presentation on it but that’s where it stops. It should be promoted just like any other counselling or clinical skill. Hence, self-care should be a fundamental part of a therapist’s daily regime. It should treated as a vital skill for we often hear the age-old adage “Prevention is better than cure.”

Here are some resources to get you started, because the first step to practising self-case is learning about it.

Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability

Caring for Ourselves: A Therapist's Guide to Personal and Professional Well-Being by Ellen K. Baker, PhD

Prachi Bhuptani

Rethinking Scarcity in Economics

Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Penguin UK, 2013; pp. 304, Rs. 504.

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Economics is often described as the science of scarcity; indeed, if there is any single foundation for economic science, it may well be in understanding the way society utilizes resources. While almost every theory in economics hinges on understanding decision-making under various conditions (uncertainty, initial endowments, among others), it is only in the past three decades that psychological factors have been incorporated into economic models of decision-making. Scarcity is the latest in a spate of behavioural economics research that looks to build a comprehensive and cohesive economic theory of decision-making with strong foundations in psychology (see also: Nudge [Thaler and Sunstein, 2003]; Thinking, Fast and Slow [Kahneman, 2011]; The Honest Truth About Dishonesty [Ariely, 2013]). In defining scarcity as a ‘mindset’, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir are able to argue for altered decision-making processes and outcomes when we perceive that we have too little, which is not as ubiquitous as physical scarcity of resources that economics studies.

First, the authors propose a taxonomy of various concepts (drawing from psychological science) that define scarcity. At the heart of this theory are two interrelated ideas of mental bandwidth and tunnelling. Intuitively, bandwidth refers to the mental capacity of an individual to focus on the task at hand under constrained processing capacity, while tunnelling refers to the refinement of our mental faculties toward a task that requires our immediate attention, that is, the one that is ‘causing’ the scarcity. Over the course of the book, the authors propose a cost-benefit approach to understanding how scarcity works: it often endows us with the short-term benefit of being able to focus better on the task at hand, but also tends to cost us our attention toward other concerns, leading to suboptimal decisions.

Scarcity is often seen in the form of three dimensions: (a) money or financial considerations; (b) time or temporal constraints; and (c) social constraints. While (a) and (b) are common areas of research in economics (particularly behavioural economics), the influence of social constraints on decision-making has only recently been explored. The authors argue that scarcity in the social dimension could refer to social isolation; for example, not having many friends or an active social life. Thus, socially isolated individuals may tend to perform worse under situations with high scrutiny, such as a date or a job interview, relative to situations where their every action is not observed.  However, simply being commonly drawn from the underlying theory of scarcity need not imply that poverty influences decision-making in the same way that being socially isolated or busy would.

The final part of the book deals with applying scarcity to everyday situations, organizational behaviour, and designing policy for individuals affected by scarcity (not unlike the libertarian paternalism in Nudge). Taking varied examples from commercial airline pilots to parenting, the authors provide cogent arguments about how people’s decisions are affected by their mental capacity as well as the environment that creates such constrained mental capacity. Despite the strong background work carried out by the authors, the book relies heavily on theoretical and hypothetical arguments, rather than employing empirical evidence (as most well-formed economic theories eventually do).  Additionally, there is little discussion of the types of psychometric tests that may be used in order to comprehensively measure scarcity, perhaps in an effort to keep the material accessible to non-scientific readers. This is perhaps a notable future course of research in scarcity and decision-making, bolstering empirical evidence for its influence.

The theory of scarcity as proposed is a novel conceptual leap for the fields of economics as well as psychology. This book is better taken as a starting point to an evolving area of research and thinking that holds considerable weight for understanding what goes on in the process of human decision-making. To some extent, Scarcity also deals with the issue of how much the environment in which the decision-maker is placed in influences decisions, and further how this environment may be endogenously determined by the decision-maker. Indeed, there is much to be learnt about behavioural economics by pursuing this line of inquiry.

Anirudh Tagat