In this piece, for all of you who would like enlightenment pertaining to a wonderful branch of therapy in the field of Mental Health, and for all who would like to know a little more about a certain brand of therapy, I will discuss  sources that illustrate the effects of information and/or technology on the focus of Art Therapy.   I will provide the links for the sources, and explain the effects or issues the sites provide information, and then, explain why I think these issues or effects are relevant to my field, the field of Mental Health.  Perhaps, after reading this, you may be interested in this
as well.
First, I would like to talk about my topic in relation to the Mental Health field. I am primarily interested in therapies related to abnormal behaviors such as, addictions, affective disorders, alcoholism, conduct disorder ,  dissociative disorders, neuroses, psychopathy, phobias, psychoses,
psychosomatic illnesses, mental retardation, and some very rare conditions such as and
Multiple Minds.
I am particularly interested in multiple personality and  schizophrenia. I am interested in the biological differences in their brain function, and that of normal brain function. The resulting prognosis of my findings will be significant, in that you will be able to see the significant difference in physical attributes of the two brains. In my interest, my intent in studying mental illness is to, but not limited to, finding and diagnosing the problem, observing behaviors associated with the problem and coming up with various theraputic constructive methods to modify the behavior associated with the
problem.
In order to simplify things, I have chosen art therapy as a single, more specific topic of interest that I would incorporate in my work. That website provides lots of information for the prospective Art Therapist. In the Multiple Minds website, you can see that therapy at work. Scroll down once you get into the site. See how art plays a role in therapy for the mind. There is a new and exciting field of art therapy out there, and it's very healing. I don't want to sound too New Age-ish, but Art and healing are joining and becoming one. The healer is discovering that art, music, dance and poetry have profound healing effects. Doctors, nurses, and therapists are now working with artists and musicians to heal people of all ages with many conditions including cancer and AIDS. Healers have found that art and music, combined with traditional medicine are powerful healing tools. At the same time, artisits and musicians have found that art and music heals themselves and others around them.

Sexual Abuse
Early childhood sexual abuse results in many disorders, and Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) commonly develops when abuse begins at an early age, aggressive coercion is used to silence, violence is present, and the perpetrator is a primary caretaker (especially a father figure). Many
children resort to trauma coping defenses such as dissociation, denial, splitting, idealizing the perpetrator, grandiosity to restore feelings of self esteem, helplessness, and the repression of anger which can bring perpetrator retaliation. Childhood sexual abuse occurs in the majority of MPD victims, interfering with identity formation.
Most cases of multiple personality have histories of early sexual abuse by family members (Incest), and usually includes physical abuse to obtain victim co-operation and silence. Physical abuse frequently begins when children develop speech. Recovered Memory (resurfacing of childhood memories for abuse) is a common symptom when sexual abuse includes physical abuse and
violence meant to silence the child. Recent research in neuroscience demonstrates the biochemical basis for an abuse victim's memory loss in child sexual abuse cases. Physical abuse is present in a large percentage of sexual abuse experiences that involve family members or
acquaintances.
Child neglect is a common finding in cases of early childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse and
multiple personality. Neglect either overtly or covertly allows family breakdown of sexual boundaries and subverts protective parental instincts that normally would shield children
from harm.
Severe early childhood abuse frequently results in Borderline Personality or Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), currently called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Psychic trauma caused by childhood sexual abuse, incest, physical abuse and neglect, frequently opens permanent fractures in early childhood personality development. Intimacy becomes equated with sexual or physical abuse, exploitation, and personality enmeshment with the perpetrator.
Can psychotherapy really help restore personality integration to victims of early childhood sexual and/or physical abuse? Yes! Medical science now has the proof. Brain scans of clients before and after undergoing psychotherapy dramatically demonstrates that normal thinking and behaving can be restored through the therapy process! Victims of severe early childhood sexual and physical abuse resulting in multiple personality, have compensating rewards awaiting them following personality integration. Therapy can restore functioning, while preserving the extraordinary talents they developed to survive childhood abuse. Recent discoveries using PET Scan neuroimaging techniques demonstrates that therapy restores normal functioning by rerouting neural connections and increasing metabolic processes in dormant regions within the brain, which were distorted and blunted during prolonged early childhood abuse.

Click on Art Methods, and you will see a beautiful website with all the wonderful colors of an Art Therapy website. This particular site gives fantastic information on methods and the application of art. It provides a wonderful source of step-by-step procedures actually showing all the techniques that computer technology could provide. I particularly enjoyed this website, because I can always use new and teriffic ideas to enhance and enrich my art experience. Not only was the website convienent, but every page I experienced turned out to be loaded with beautiful colors and lots of information. I was getting happy just turning the pages!

 Art programs in hospitals is a new and exciting website devoted to the therapist who wants to bring
art to sick people. What a fantastic program not just for the mentally ill, but the physically
handicapped as well.  How Art Heals the Mind has always been amazing to me. This website contains pertinent information regarding Color Therapy as healing. This is something everyone needs to know.  I would eventually like to apply my knowledge to the healing arts in the Mental Health hospitals, but now, after visiting these websites, I am getting interested in Children's hospitals
as well!
 Art, Art Education, & Art Therapy at ArtForce1 is based on a philosophy, which empowers the person and helps to make them more self-directed. That is what the aim and scope. And I need to recognize at the outset that most of us resist owning our power, becoming self-directed. We've been used too long; to be told by others what to do, and more often, what not to do. This has led us to believe that we are incapable of knowing for ourselves. We sum it up; we ask others what's best. We give up
our power to parents, teachers, employers, the clergy, and politicians - all those who profess to know best for us.
Using my resources in Art Therapy, I aim to reverse this process. A student will ask me a question. I'll say: what do you think? The student can then discover that she knows the answer within herself. She has reclaimed a little of her power, has begun her journey towards becoming
person-centered.
The necessary learning does not occur through reading about, writing about, talking about the criteria of traditional education, but through much personal work. First, we need to discover what gets in the way of being person-centered. Old automatic strategies learned in our childhood need to be
identified. Only after such often painful uncovering can we relinquish the old, be available to the new. So we spend much time during the beginnings of Art Therapy being empathetic, accepting and genuine, before we can begin to extend that way of being to others. This can be a
very slow process.
Part of our identity and learning about our past, is to be commited to the society in which we live. I have experienced its benefit for myself. I offer it as a counselor, and as a trainer. I know that personal development can occur in a climate of acceptance, empathy, and genuineness. I know when an
individual is regarded as trustworthy and responsible, and she or he can move towards a more autonomous way of being. So why add another component - art?
Through research conducted mainly at the California Institute of Technology by Roger Sperry (1973), the separate functions of the two hemispheres of the brain were revealed, showing that each hemisphere perceives reality in its own way. The mode of the left brain is thinking, analytic, judgmental, and verbal; the right side of the brain is non-verbal, spatial, spontaneous, intuitive, creative, non-judgmental. Sperry says: "Modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere." In education, science and the workplace, academic knowing, rather than intuitive knowing, is favored as selection criteria, a value judgment.
In therapy, a microcosm of society, it can happen that by "talking about it" the client can stay in his or her lift side of the brain, and not connect with repressed material on the right side of the brain - the very material needed for integration. By introducing imaging, made visible in art form, and working with it in a person-centered mode, integration can occur. Part of the person's identity is challenged when only one side of the brain is being tapped.
Images contain messages from the subconscious - perhaps hopes or fears - needing to bee known. Alice Miller (1987) writes that "the spontaneous images I began to do helped me not only to discover my personal story by also to free myself from the intellectual constraints and concepts of my upbringing and my professional training." When thoughts are pushed aside, spontaneous images can emerge: symbolic aspects of the self, in need of recognition. Art Therapy helps one to connect to the visual memory and it allows images to present themselves to the inner eye. One can make those images visible in art form. One of the best ways to do this is to try to elicit the meaning of the image with a person-centered facilitator, while keeping the client's identity in tact.
We are born creative, even though our culture may not value creativity. With art we can rediscover our creative force which releases such an amazing array of symbolic images. They come to us, bearing their gifts, and a person-centered counselor can help us recognize such gifts. Somehow, by thinking less, it is possible to know more. Working with art is, in itself, a creative spontaneous process, as the counselor moves from words to image, to feelings to body language, to wider reflections. Wherever the focus of the moment, counselor and client proceed on a journey into the unknown, a magical
world of color.

Art Therapy and Psychology
Counseling with the therapeutic use of art is most helpful: imaging can be suggested "on the hoof" during a session, to explore further a feeling, a situation, and an emotive word. Psychologists apply art in many ways.
Roger Sperry mentions a woman who talked about her friend who had promised to ring her the previous night, and did not do so. She felt disappointed, abandoned. I suggested she close her eyes and let an image come to her to do with bandoned" She drew a baby in a cot, crying, a wall, and a woman the other side of the wall turned away. She spoke of herself, the baby, and the mother who never came when she wanted her. She was amazed. A memory from pre-verbal times. Thus far all her work in therapy to do with issues if inclusion and exclusion had not brought up this memory. The image connected her to the source of her belief in herself as being unlovable, as someone to be excluded, to her exclusion of herself.
Psychologists ask questions pertaining to the whys of people. Because psychology is the science concerned with behavior, both humans and animals, it is only about 125 years old. Despite its youth, it is a broad discipline, essentially spanning subject matter from biology to sociology. Biology
studies the structures and functions of living organisms. Sociology examines how groups function in

Art Therapy and Anthropology
In addition to Art Therapy applied to psychological aspects of mental illnesses and memory, ethical behavior from an anthropological standpoint is discussed here. The individual acquires from his group an extensive list of manners and customs. What a man eats and drinks and how he does so, what
sorts of sexual behavior he engages in, how he builds a house or draws a picture or rows a boat, what subjects he talks about, what music he makes, what kinds of personal relationships he enters into and what kinds he avoids - all depend in part upon the practices of the group of which he is a member.  The actual manners and customs of many groups have, of course, been extensively
described by sociologists and anthropologists. Here we are concerned only with the kinds of
processes, which they exemplify. From an anthropologist's point of view, art is and was the integral part of communication in the Stone Age. Early man drew on rock communicating with his family and friends. They were dependant upon the communication in their social environment for ways in which they did physical things, and built things, rowed a boat, for example, they depended in part upon certain mechanical contingencies; some movements are effective and others ineffective in propelling the boat. Many of these activities depended on how well they applied their skills in drawing. So, Art Therapy goes way back and there are signs of this throughout the Stone Age.

Expressive Art Therapy
There are further, more specific characteristics of the therapy side and the consulting and education side, but I believe we have enough here to begin a larger dialogue on this subject. Perhaps it does need to be said that the whole therapy process is rapidly growing, forming and finding itself. The
expressive arts therapy process is more known as a separate field of endeavor, but there are still a wide range of practitioners. As the laws (or lack of laws) for psychotherapists and counselors vary widely in different states of the U.S., and even more widely in different countries, there are different expressive arts therapists who are clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, mental health counselors, marriage family and child counselors, pastoral counselors, school counselors, adjunctive
therapists, etc., etc. The field of expressive arts consulting and education is even broader and less defined. It includes the incorporation of the expressive arts into: organizational consulting, health education and hospital care, public health administration, human resource management, arts
education, creativity development, education in the areas of personal growth and human potential, community arts projects, elementary, secondary, undergraduate and graduate education, and in
many other areas of human need.  This field is even less articulated and defined than the therapy side, it is only now coming together and forming its identity.

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