![]() I suppose I didn’t want to rush into another hospitality job I wouldn’t enjoy. I had another job interview lined up at a bar, but in the end I never went. I cleaned the house every day and felt myself disappearing a sort of Eleanor Rigby, going crazy at home. I didn’t want my friends to think I had become some sort of work-shy layabout, and when I did see them, all I could talk about was my failing mental health. My partner even bought me an expensive laptop, but it became an albatross around my neck. On the one hand, I felt this was my chance: to stay at home and write the book I had been chipping away at for two years. I took a bar job, but it made me even more miserable, so I quit. Instead, I started to drown, quietly and privately. My mental health suffered during a bitterly long winter. But that winter brought trudging two-hour commutes in the snow, and darkness. After the pain of the previous year, I found a new relationship, moved house, and I brought the paints. “You can get a lot of stories, of justifications, rationalising from a person … but when you actually create images around how you’re feeling, and put your emotions out on the paper, you are bypassing a lot of that, and you get right to the issues.”įor me, recovery through art was a discovery I made in my kitchen one morning. ![]() “When you’re just talking, you’re dealing with a lot of sense mechanisms, and they’re verbal,” the Galway-based therapist says. It’s just that the therapist’s approach changes with the client population,” explains Plant.Īnother advantage, says Social Art Ireland’s Susan Slevin, is that it it can be “faster, in one respect”. “It can be used with people who are non-verbal, people with intellectual disabilities, people with physical disabilities, children, as well as highly sophisticated adults. An advantage it offers is its accessibility, especially to those who are too young to articulate their experiences, or who struggle to communicate their distress. It’s generally integrated with talk therapy. It’s used to treat a vast array of mental illnesses, including difficult-to-treat eating disorders and PTSD. “That goes back to when people first started making art.”Īrt therapy as a formal psychotherapy began around the Second World War, when “shell-shocked” soldiers (what we would now call PTSD sufferers) began making positive emotional recovery through creating art. He’s been in the business of art therapy for over 30 years, in Ireland and England. He’s an art therapist working with clients at the Oscailt Centre in Ballsbridge, Dublin. “There’s an inherent therapeutic value in art making,” says Liam Plant. So I cleaned, killed the fleas, and started using the paints. My first weeks in the house, I left the paints on the top shelf of my wardrobe and waited for someone to phone and collect them. The last roommate’s legacy was nothing special: a discarded collection of rusting pans, a dire flea infestation, and a bag of acrylic paints. My days had been spent in a sort of permanent, low-level anxiety as I worried about whether or not I would get the permanent residency I so badly wanted. ![]() As well as the break-up, I’d lost a good friend, a job I needed, and was now working in a stultifying data entry role instead.
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