Creativity and Healing With Art and Music Therapy

Throughout Youngster Life and Inventive Arts month, we’re spotlighting the growth of our Creative Arts Therapy program and the best way that music therapy and art therapy improve the well-being of sufferers and households

Since 2017, Lucile Packard Kids’s Hospital Stanford’s music and artwork therapists have been serving to youngsters specific their emotions about being within the hospital and inspiring them alongside their well being care journey. Having seen the highly effective impression that these therapies have been having on sufferers—lowered stress, elevated coping abilities, extra engagement with their remedy plans—this system expanded and has grown to incorporate 5 full-time music therapists and two artwork therapists, in addition to two “aid” artwork therapists.

Inventive Arts Therapies Week (March 17–23) is well known each third week of March throughout Youngster Life and Inventive Arts month. It’s a chance to have fun the essential function these Inventive Arts therapists play in combining the advantages of inventive expression and psychological help. And this 12 months at Stanford Medication Kids’s Well being, there’s so much to have fun.

Customizing therapies to fulfill particular wants

“The language of kids is play, music, and artwork—phrases are extra language of adults,” says one of many artwork therapists. “While you come to the hospital, it’s actually aggravating, and you haven’t any management. While you create artwork and music, it creates a way of security. We leverage that and use artwork and music as instruments to assist youngsters recuperate and heal throughout a hospitalization.”

Inventive Arts therapists plan tailor-made interventions based mostly on every affected person’s wants and developmental phases. As an example, artwork therapists could combine conscious respiration methods for sufferers who discover this handy through the art-making course of to reinforce calmness and leisure. One instance of an intervention is permitting sufferers to decide on their most well-liked colours for visualizing their respiration, serving to them to attach mindfulness with their inventive journey. Or if a affected person struggles to verbalize their frustrations, artwork therapists can information them to find an expressive medium. This might be making a collage, portray, journaling, or drawing to visually seize their feelings and course of them.

Equally, music therapists tailor interventions to swimsuit a baby’s particular person wants, talents, and pursuits since sufferers’ wants change so typically. They could play music to evaluate a baby for his or her response to it. Or they could have interaction a baby in musical play or songwriting as methods to assist them develop constructive coping abilities. “Music is usually a nice motivator,” says one of many music therapists. “When somebody has no management, doing issues which can be usually most well-liked may also help them take part in remedy. And we discover by way of analysis that it could actually cut back their size of keep and the danger of long-term medical trauma.”

Each music and artwork therapists are carefully built-in with a baby’s medical group. When developing with a music remedy intervention, for instance, they could work with neurology to seek out methods to assist youngsters with traumatic brain injuries, encephalitis, or issues of consciousness to advertise restoration after an damage. Chang Chun (Alice) Chiang, supervisor, Inventive Arts Programming, factors out that music remedy performs a major function in ache administration and that even passive listening can affect a affected person’s heartbeat, respiration, and general leisure. “We’ve got a number of alternatives to increase into analysis by working with medical doctors in ache administration or within the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) and seeing how music may also help,” she says.

Increasing enjoyable, creativity, and bonding by way of group packages

In the course of the first few years of the Inventive Arts program, therapists labored one-on-one with youngsters on individualized artwork and music remedy classes. Then, to increase their attain, they began to deliver collectively sufferers and their households for group interventions co-facilitated by artwork and music therapists. However the pandemic put these group classes on maintain for a number of years. Beginning final November, the group packages resumed. They’re now held at the very least twice a month and have expanded to incorporate outpatients in addition to sufferers’ siblings and caregivers, and the group is trying ahead to growing the frequency of the classes sooner or later.

Group packages are based mostly on the wants and skills of the households who attend. For instance, if this system is for cardiac sufferers who’re adjusting to lengthy hospitalizations, artwork therapists could deal with making a transition object to accompany the sufferers by way of the method. If contributors share motion targets, the intervention could tackle extra of a bodily facet.

Working group packages supplies therapists with beneficial touchpoints. Whereas inventive arts therapists deal with particular person help for sufferers, providing group classes permits caregivers to strengthen bonds with the sufferers’ members of the family, elevating their skill to supply holistic care. “Assembly a affected person’s grandfather or brother deepens our skill to hold over an understanding of that affected person into our care with them,” says one of many artwork therapists. These connections enrich the therapeutic relationship, making certain that the care is complete and customized.

Being within the hospital could be extraordinarily isolating for sufferers and their caregivers. It may separate sufferers from their siblings. Group packages encourage households to take pleasure in a significant expertise collectively, strengthening bonds. And social interactions with different households in related circumstances open the door for peer help whereas offering a way of neighborhood that households wouldn’t get in a room by themselves.

The therapeutic energy of inventive arts

Inventive Arts therapists work so much with youngsters on the hematology/oncology unit. Generally, they get to know them from the start when a prognosis is unsure, all by way of chemotherapy, proper up till the time when remedy ends. When working with youngsters with most cancers, they think about their tradition and faith—and hair loss has large symbolic significance in sure cultures. With this in thoughts, an intervention they’ve developed entails making a stop-motion animated video through which the affected person creates a personality who loses their hair; this may also help a baby externalize their fears by way of storytelling.

For one younger oncology affected person, Gloria, taking part in artwork and music remedy has been a vibrant spot. She began coming to the hospital in March 2024 and commenced seeing artwork and music therapists instantly. “She enjoys them so much,” says her mom, Julia. “Not simply the music and artwork, but in addition the conversations with the therapists. Generally when she’s unhappy, she is going to begin an artwork or music remedy session, and her temper improves.”

Gloria says that she enjoys writing songs, enjoying piano, and easily speaking together with her music therapist, Emily. And together with her artwork therapist, Queenie, she likes to color, make Play-Doh shapes and animals, and speak about her emotions.

Seeing Gloria—who had at all times been energetic and cheerful—being sick and hospitalized “has been difficult and painful,” says Julia. “The state of affairs has been arduous.” Nonetheless, Julia is grateful for the help. “Generally, she doesn’t wish to be left alone, however there are occasions once I must do issues or run errands and don’t wish to go away her by herself. The truth that the therapists are prepared to come back in and spend time with Gloria means so much. I’ve been in a position to regain a while for myself and know that Gloria was not alone.”

Queenie, who has labored with Gloria, channels a phrase that struck a chord together with her when she’s working with sick youngsters. She heard it whereas experiencing the therapeutic energy of portray herself. “Medication isn’t the one strategy to heal,” she says. “Artwork is medication for the soul.” This growth of what it takes to deal with the entire particular person—physique, thoughts, spirit—additionally conjures up different Inventive Arts therapists to proceed increasing this system’s attain. “Up to now 10 years, I’ve seen a constructive shift towards treating the entire particular person,” says one of many music therapists. “I’m so excited to ship the message that right here at Stanford, we are treating the entire particular person, and that we’re all greater than a prognosis. I’m excited to develop our program and present this to extra individuals.”

Learn more about our Creative Arts Therapy program >