Creating ‘art-alongside’ in Peer Art Therapy (PATh) groups: nurturing connection and trust, and responding to power dynamics

ABSTRACT

Background: Creating ‘art-alongside’ in peer art therapy groups: connection, trust, and power dynamics.

Practice Contexts: Online, private practice; peer-focused PATh group and PATh group with people within the LGBTQA + community. Face-to-face, non-government organisation; art therapy groups with people living with cancer.

Approach: Peer art therapists enter therapeutic spaces alongside their own Lived Experience of mental-health challenges. In PATh, art therapists create art-alongside participants in group art therapy.

Outcomes: Through creating art-alongside peer art therapists can demonstrate embodied understanding of and modelling of surviving mental ill-health experiences as well as deliver authentic empathy for participants with current struggles. Art-alongside can be a mutually-connecting, co-learning, beneficial practice for participants and therapist. Creating art-alongside in PATh groups can create safer spaces for participants and provide grounded therapist-as-peer role modelling.

Conclusions: Creating art-alongside participants in PATh applies peer-work and art therapy understandings and skills. It dismantles therapist/participant power locations of traditional art therapy and can be a process of mutuality and connection for participants and therapist.

Implications for Research:

Co-produced research with participants and therapists on the experience of art-alongside in PATh groups and co-produced research across ‘companion art’, ‘reflection-art’ and art-alongside in PATh, evidencing the impact of therapist-articulated Lived Experience. In addition, research is needed into the inclusion of an art-alongside PATh model in art therapy training.

Plain-language summary

Peer Art Therapy (PATh) is the framework used for practitioners who are trained and experienced in both art therapy and mental health peer work. Peer work is the practice of using our own Lived Experiences to support someone also living with similar ones and being equals within our spaces. In our context we specifically mean ‘experiences of mental health issues’. It combines the theories, skills, tasks and practices of both fields to work alongside and responsively to clients.

Peer art therapists – the authors included – share with clients, aspects of their own personal experiences of living with mental health challenges. In this article, we talk about the practical application of this approach and how peer art therapists create ‘art-alongside’ the participants in their groups. This practice can benefit both the participants and therapists and creates strong connected relationships where both are learning. Our article discusses the concepts and theories of this approach and the positive responses it creates, including: building safer spaces, peer/role modelling, increased empathy for and understanding and survival of complex mental health challenges.

The authors use personal examples of art created alongside from our clinical settings – online peer-focussed peer art therapy group and peer art therapy group with LGBTIQA + clients and art therapy groups in a non-government organisation, with people living with cancer. Our work also dismantles the need for therapist as expert in the practice of art therapy. We recommend a number of areas for future research about the value of peer art therapists making art alongside clients - research that includes both clients and therapists.

KEYWORDS:

• Peer art therapy
• therapist lived experience
• group art therapy
• creating art-alongside
• companion art
• dual experience
• lived experience
• peer work

Acknowledgements

As researchers, mental health professionals and most importantly, people with lived experience, we thank each and every participant that has informed and educated us throughout the practices detailed here and the writing of this article. Without you there would be no art therapy groups or this practice paper. You will always remain our greatest teachers, reflectors and fountains of wisdom. We commit to future co-produced publications and research with you where we can openly name and celebrate your contributions and provide you the voice you so deserve.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgement of Country⁵

This work was written across many countries and has been witnessed by the ancestral lands of the Wangal People (Mahlie’s adopted home and workplace), the lands of the Dharawal people (Mahlie’s workplace and childhood home), Gundungurra lands (Catherine’s chosen home and workplace) and Darug lands (Catherine’s workplace). We also met on Bidjigal and Gadigal lands on ancient cliffs looking out to the endless ocean, sheltering from the heat under hardy scrub trees. Working, learning, yarning and listening with each other and the land was a privilege and an honour. The lands on which we meet to deeply listen are as important as each of us. These lands, rivers, oceans, mountains, trees and all those they home and protect walk with us purposefully and have facilitated much understanding, clarity, growth and healing. Alongside Mahlie as she moves across these lands are her guiding ancestors from the Wiradjuri nation, her Pop’s people. They bring thousands of years of knowing and being with this land, the fire and passion for change and the ancient practice of creative storytelling. Catherine lives with deep appreciation for and gratitude to Gundungurra land in Darug Nation that holds her today, and Kuring-Gai country that loved her from early childhood as she sought refuge on their earth, under their skies, with sunlight soaking her skin, moonlight holding her in the darkness, and trees welcoming her in friendship – it is part of her fabric.

Note to editors

As a First Nations person living in continuing neo-colonialism it is Mahlie’s right and responsibility to name the impacts still being experienced due to constant invasion and systemic genocide still thriving in ‘Australia’.

As an attempt at reconciliation, it is customary and respectful to identify, share songlines and lore and pay respects to the lands we occupy at all formal (and informal) gatherings on country. This practice is recognised by institutions nation(s)-wide and considered best practice and bare minimum.

The Journal of Creative Arts Therapy (Australia) recognises this and as such does not include the acknowledgment of country in the articles word count.

We - both authors - ask IJAT to be progressive and proactive and do the same, allowing the voices of Mahlie’s ancestors and the ancestors of the 200 + brother/sister Nations across this Australian continent – all violently colonised lands - to be heard without restriction, curation and further neo-colonisation. https://www.commonground.org.au/learn/acknowledgement-of-country#:~:text=An%20Acknowledgement%20of%20Country%20is,meeting%2C%20speech%20or%20formal%20occasion

Declaration of interest statement

No conflicts of interest were involved in writing this practice paper.

Funding details

No funding was received for this practice paper.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Intentional Peer Support informs peer art therapy. It is built on Three Principles: 1. Learning & Growing. 2. Caring for Relationship. 3. Hope-Based Relationships. And Four Tasks: 1. Connection. 2. Worldview. 3. Mutuality. 4. Moving Toward (Mead & MacNeil, 2006).

2 In Australia, a Peer Support Worker is a trained mental health professional.

3 In Australia, Lived Experience indicates specific experience of mental illness, or the symptomology that could be considered criteria for a mental illness and/or the use of mental health services as distinct from lived experiences not described as mental illnesses (such as racism). In the United Kingdom (UK), the term denoting Lived Experience is Service User, and we use this where relevant to the UK literature and practices. In the Unites States of America (USA) context, Roots and Roses (2020) use Service User. A ‘Peer worker’ is a person with Lived Experience who works professionally in the mental health sector. Service User is the UK term for LE in Aust.

4 This theme necessitated a participant agreed upon re-shaped group format, and included scaffolded weekly themes and directives suggested by Catherine.

5 An Acknowledgement of Country recognises the theft of land and brutal colonisation of the continent referred to as ‘Australia’. We use the term ‘First Nations’ purposefully, to acknowledge that Nations existed with systems of governance, education, healthcare and lore before British invasion and genocide, deconstructing ‘savage and primitive’ narratives connected to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Neo-colonisation continues to impact the social, physical, emotional and psychological health of the world’s oldest living culture. These lands were never ceded, but stolen.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mahlie Jewell

Mahlie Jewell, AThR: Master of Art Therapy, Bachelor of Communication Graphic Design, AdvDip Mental Health and Drug and Alcohol Counselling, DBT Skills and Therapy Facilitation, Intentional Peer Support, Narrative Therapy Certificate.

Mahlie (she/her) is a proud queer Wiradjuri woman living on stolen Wangal land. She is an artist, mental health advocate, peer worker, peer art psychotherapist and DBT therapist. Mahlie holds advanced diplomas in mental health and drug and alcohol counselling, a Bachelor in Communication, Graphic Design (co-design) a Master in Art Therapy, training in Narrative Therapy and Trauma-informed Queer diversity practice. Mahlie works alongside people who share some of her experiences of queerness, blakness, persistent mental health issues, chronic illness and disability with a special interest in working with others with personality and dissociative ‘disorders’, complex trauma and neurodiversity. Mahlie works within numerous organisations, including Twenty10 - a state-based LGBTIQA + youth service and QLife - a national LGBTIQA + crisis service creating and delivering arts-based therapeutic programs, The Australian BPD Foundation and Project Air Strategy (University of Wollongong) in research, treatment design, awareness and systemic advocacy. In 2018 she won the International Arts and Health Conference ‘Mental health and the arts’ Award for her work ‘warpaint’. In her roles, her lived experience of severe and persistent mental health issues is embraced, welcomed, respected and vital to her ability to deliver high-quality outcomes.

Catherine Camden-Pratt

Dr Catherine Camden-Pratt, AThR: PhD, MAppSc (Social Ecology), GradCert ATh, AdvDip TransATh, Graduate Hakomi Somatic Psychotherapy, DipTeach (Primary), Intentional Peer Support.

Catherine (I/we, she/her/they) lives on stolen Gundungurra Country, and is a social ecologist, artist, peer art therapist, writer and casual lecturer in the Master of Art Therapy at Western Sydney University. She is co-editor of the Journal of Creative Arts Therapies. Catherine is a nationally awarded university arts-based experiential educator with 40years professional experience in creative education, from preschool to university. Her private clinical practice works with children, families and adults. She facilitates groups with people living with cancer. A solo and community exhibited mixed-media artist with a focus on social justice, their artistic themes emerge from personal stories of sexual assault, domestic violence and ‘madness’. A feature of Catherine’s work is mirrors that locate the viewer inside the artworks – inviting questions about how each person is implicated in social justice. Research areas include autoethnography, arts-based research/pedagogies and peer art therapy; with a focus on intersectionality/voice/silence and art therapy as social justice. Catherine’s sole-authored popular press book from her collaborative and autoethnographic art-based PhD shares stories of cis-gendered women in families with a mother who has/had mental health diagnoses. She co-authored the first Australian social ecology textbook, is published in scholarly books and journals, as well as in poetry and narrative anthologies.