Princeton House Behavioral Health’s outpatient center in North Brunswick, N.J. holds an occasional event called Women Got Talent, a title that acknowledges both its reality TV namesake and the participants, who are patients of the Women’s Program.
Women Got Talent is a showcase, not a competition. Participants might sing, play an instrument, or dance. Some have displayed paintings or drawings. Others have baked. The event has been held twice so far as part of an effort at North Brunswick to incorporate a creative activity for patients every quarter. “The purpose is to instill confidence and demonstrate that everyone has some kind of talent,” said Eileen Hennessey, clinical manager of the Women’s Program at that location.
While Women Got Talent is unique to North Brunswick, similar creative activities exist throughout Princeton House, which provides inpatient and outpatient treatment for individuals with behavioral health concerns, substance abuse issues, or both. These activities complement the creative arts therapies that are already incorporated into the treatment plan for each individual at the inpatient campus in Princeton, N.J., and outpatient centers in Eatontown, Hamilton, Moorestown, North Brunswick, and Princeton.
To an untrained observer, participants in creative arts therapy or recreational activities might appear to be just having fun. But important work is happening at the same time. “Sometimes patients are not ready to verbalize how they feel or what they experienced,” said Yuko Martin, director of Allied Clinical Therapies at the inpatient campus. “The creative art forms often provide non-threatening and non-judgmental means to express themselves. All of our creative art therapists are trained and credentialed to analyze and interpret art expression to gain more insight into individuals’ conditions. Sometimes the patients themselves make new discoveries by processing their creative art with their therapists.”
Christina Taylor, senior allied clinical therapist at the Hamilton Center, said many patients can learn to reframe their own perspective. For example, some clients view their finished image and say, “Wow, that’s good! I did that.” Yet, when another client offers a compliment, it elicits an automatic dismissal. The goal is to help individuals learn to accept and internalize positive feedback instead of devaluing themselves or what they create — in any context, not only in art therapy. Success does not come overnight, but “art therapy can help spark something within the patient to start the process of changing that perspective,” Taylor said.
“There’s no grade, no judgment,” she added. “It’s just a way to express yourself.”
When clients create artworks that clearly make them uncomfortable or distressed — perhaps while expressing a painful experience — Taylor analyzes the work with them and offers options for what to do with the art. She normalizes destroying or discarding it. “It’s their choice what to do. It can be cathartic to throw it away.”
Every March since 2011, during Creative Arts Therapies Week, the Hamilton location showcases art produced in therapy and highlights how creating the pieces translates to increased mental health, wellness and stability for clients. Artists are not identified to preserve their privacy. A table display explains the art therapy process, but “the imagery really speaks for itself.”
It’s All About Resilience
At the Moorestown outpatient center, the results of art therapy and recreational opportunities are evident everywhere — from the gardens outside the building (tended by the Adolescent Program) to artwork decorating hallways and walls inside. The center’s Men’s Program recently produced a pair of inspiring artworks: a large hallway sign titled RESILIENCE and a 10-foot-wide painting of a mountain that adorns a wall of the men’s group therapy room.
Linda Baker, an allied clinical therapist at Princeton House-Moorestown, was an intern when she coordinated the projects last year. Primary therapists working with the Men’s Program asked her to produce a painting of a mountain, symbolizing the treatment journey, where men could offer encouragement or insights to future patients. Baker made it a group project.
Her experience at that point had been primarily working with children, adolescents, and women — never men — and she wondered if it might pose a challenge. “It can be harder for men to be vulnerable,” she said, “and you need to be vulnerable to express yourself.”
But she soon learned differently. All of the men contributed; all were engaged. When new men joined the group, she did not need to explain anything about the project — the others had already brought them up to speed. “I had key allies in the group,” Baker said, including a patient with a background as an art teacher, who helped keep things moving forward.
The mountain was produced over several weeks, using a drawing that emerged from a collaborative effort by the patients. The design was tweaked, based on one patient’s feedback, to add other mountains, in silhouette, surrounding the original peak. Later, the patients brought the scene to multimedia, three-dimensional life using recycled cardboard, newsprint, acrylic paint, and caulk.
The finished work includes other touches, such as a prism bending a ray of light into a rainbow of color and the first dozen or so notes of encouragement from patients. A poster on the wall, to the left of the mountain, bears a famous quote from Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
Soon after completing the mountain, Baker and the men’s group — which still included many of the same individuals — began work on RESILIENCE, an abstract expressionist piece that spells out the title at the center of the canvas. The group came up with the potential titles for RESILIENCE and then voted on four finalists.
Baker painted the entire canvas in solid blue but the men completed the rest of the work, down to the detail of choosing the size and font of letters and cutting them out of a stencil. Finally, they threw or dripped paint of white, silver, gold, and lighter shades of blue to speckle over the dark blue canvas. “Some men were resistant at first, because the splatter technique meant they would have no control over how the finished product would look,” Baker said, but, in the end, all of the patients participated.
Through the two projects, Baker saw that the men in the group had a tendency to form strong bonds with one another. On the day the group painted RESILIENCE, one patient — the former teacher — was pulled out of the group to meet with his primary therapist. His fellow patients were disappointed that he could not be there.
The next day, Baker was happy to tell them that he had returned after they had gone and got the chance to leave his mark on the canvas.