When patients are given a creative environment for personal expression, they experience a freedom that allows them to unearth and dissect their inner feelings, which is an important part of the healing process. By using images to communicate, patients often better express their emotions than if they were to convey them verbally.

Our art room is stocked with paint, clay, collage and drawing materials, pastels, colored pencils, and other creative supplies for free expression. Patients take part in regular art therapy through directed projects that relate back to topics covered during group sessions as well as the reasons they came into treatment. This form of therapy is not at all cognitive, so it works with the lower parts of the brain that we don’t normally have access to, and it’s beneficial to experienced artists and the “creatively-challenged” alike. That’s because the works of art created are not the final product. Instead, the simple yet profound exercise is about what patients can recognize and realize about themselves through the process.