Are you often required to work with other professionals?
Yes. Every day when I go in I have a handover meeting of up to half-an-hour, where I’m able to liaise with all the support staff. I attend CPA (Care Programme Approach) meetings, I attend clinical services meetings and also sometimes chair them. I contribute to peer supervision, meeting with the company’s assistant psychologists, speech and language therapists and occupational therapists. It’s very much a matter of working together as a team.
Within this multi-disciplinary team, is there an awareness of art therapy and how do you describe your role to other people (e.g. clients/ service users, other professionals)?
That’s one of the challenges [with pioneering a new service]. It takes up a lot of my energy. I’ve had to develop a PowerPoint training package for staff educating them on what art therapy is and it’s potential. When I first started I put together an information pack for each unit just to tell them about the service and how to refer client. .Most of the people hadn’t heard of art therapy before. It’s quite a struggle to keep validating art therapy’s position. As well as that, the company was a family-run business when I started so there was more leeway in terms of what we could do. However, it was then bought by an equity firm so now there’s a lot more corporate pressure on me to provide evidence for what I’m doing. It’s been quite tough.
Is the service you provide informed by a particular therapeutic approach or model of art therapy?
The organisation loosely follows a recovery model. I am psychodynamically trained and tend to work in a non-directive way to begin with, feeling my way around and trying to work out what’s best for the patient. I have since attended the ICAPT (International Centre for Arts Psychotherapies Training) Mentalisation course for psychosis and borderline personality disorder which has really helped me to offer appropriate direction to ensure that the patient remains engaged and stays in the present as opposed to allowing too much space to think and feed paranoia.
I have also started to use GAS (Goal Attainment Scaling) where the therapist tries to decide on three to five goals that she or he would find useful with the patient.
In thinking about what you said about moving between these different settings (e.g. group work, one-to-one, hospital or residential), are you required to bring along your own art materials or do you have supply of art materials in each of the settings that you work?
That’s something I’m working towards. But at the moment I tend to have a backpack full of materials moving between places.
Does that put a restriction on what you can bring?
Yes, it does.
What sort of art materials do you usually have to hand?
I tend to bring different types of paper (different sizes if possible). I try to leave bigger rolls of paper at the unit if I can. It’s all space-dependent really. Lots of pens, pencils, crayons, paints. Sometimes I might have clay or play dough as well. It’s down to space.
