Creativity and Healing Links
- Domestic Violence and Music Therapy
This site examines the power of using popular music as a way for people to express their feelings. It includes esamples of therapeutic messages in popular music as well as original music by Freudian Slip, a therapeutic rock band.
- The Narrative and Healing pages at LitSite Alaska
These pages feature articles including an Introduction to Narrative and Healing, Using Stories for Growth and Healing, Writing as an Adjunct to Medical Therapy, Writing, Emotions and Memory and Narrative Medicine. Two healing Narratives are also posted here.
- Autobiography and Therapeutic Healing
- Arts as a Healing Force
The goal of this site is to immerse visitors in the field of art and healing. This includes storytelling, poetry, music, dance, visual arts, painting, sculpture – everything that is usually thought of as creativity. Say the creators of these pages,"We believe that art and healing are joining together to become one. As art and healing merge, the field of art will be changed and the field of medicine will be changed." Some of the sections include How Art Heals, Hospitals, Artists, the History of Using Art to Heal and Medicine Wheels as a Form of Healing art.
- Survivors Art Foundation
This foundation's mission is to mainstream trauma survivors with physical or mental disabilities into the arts. Seven artists who have survived trauma are featured. The site also has good links to arts organizations and resources for survivors. The foundation sells beautiful cards by trauma survivors on their site, including a condolence card specific to the September 11, tragedy.
- Healing With Art
This article by Arlene Green presents a good summary of how self-expression through art is therapeutic. It is posted on the Wellness eJournal at Complementary Wellness, a site, devoted to complimentary medical practices.
- The Soul Food Café
Run by Heather Blakey, this site features a section on writing as creative medicine, one on muses, and one on reclaiming the imagination through creative arts. Of special interest is Peeling the Onion, pages on the arts and healing. This site is filled with useful and inspirational information.
- Expressive Therapies
This page posted on the Lesley University site has links to eleven programs that display art by people facing challenges such as cancer, psychiatric illnesses, trauma and homelessness. There are also links to professional expressive arts therapy organizations. (Lesley offers a degree program in Expressive Arts Therapy.)
- The Healing Power of the Arts
This site funded by the Colorado Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts is a compendium of annotated and rated links to many sites dealing with art and healing both the body and the mind, as well as the spirit and the planet. Links include sites dealing with blindness, hearing impairment and other disabilities.
- Art and Arthritis: A Tale of Beauty and the Beast
The online version of an Arthritis News Magazine contains this wonderful article profiling artists Renoir, Rubens, Klee and Dufy, each of whom had severe and painful arthritis, yet continued painting.
- Artists with Rheumatoid Arthritis Create Beauty Amid Pain
Dr. James S. Louie who has studied artists with arthritis is interviewed in this article that discusses Renoir and also mentions Grandma Moses and Toulouse-Lautrec as painters who continued to work despite painful and crippling joint disease.
- Disability: Reclaiming the Self Through Art
This site exhibits art by fourteen artists with disabilities including attention deficit disorder, macular degeneration, multiple sclerosis, rheumatiod arthritis, blindness, and AIDS as well as others Most of the artists address their particular disability. These artists work in painting, photography, sculpture, fiber art, computer imaging and poetry.
- In Art in Transition
Sue DeSalvatore, an artist with chronic pain, tells her story about her disability and how she has managed to continue to make art. In the months ahead, she promises to share adaptive studio layouts, ergonomics, space organization and inspiration for the artist with disabilities.
- FMSers Art Selection
This is a link where people with fibromyalgia syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome display their paintings, photography, painting and cartoons.