Part of a healthy society includes the arts, and part of an individual life well-lived includes the arts, says Drexel University
Department of Creative Arts Therapy chair Dr. Sherry Goodill. So why shouldn't the modern healthcare system include them as well?
That’s part of the goal of Drexel’s new
Parkway Health and Wellness Clinic, a 23,000 square-foot facility that opened in November on the second floor of the Three Parkway Building at 1601 Cherry Street. It’s a new center for patient care and research through the university’s
College of Nursing and Health Professions.
"We had a vision to develop a clinical practice integrated with the research that we do here," explains Dr. Sue Smith, chair of Drexel’s Department of Health Systems & Sciences Research.
The Clinic, a teaching as well as a treatment and research facility, is open to a wide range of patients with physical and behavioral health issues. They offer primary care services (focusing on women's health and occupational therapy), physical therapy for athletes and those with medical conditions, and more.
According to Dr. Smith, Drexel’s Creative Arts Therapy PhD program is unique in its field. She also asserts that creative arts therapy is "an up and coming area that is not as well developed as some other health divisions."
Dance, music, or the literary and visual arts can have a major positive impact on patients with emotional or behavioral challenges. As with any new health discipline, researchers are working on building the evidence for what those exact mechanisms of change are, explains Dr. Elizabeth Templeton, a clinical assistant professor and coordinator of Creative Arts Therapies' clinical services.
"Arts themselves can be inherently therapeutic and healing," says Dr. Goodill. "What we do in creative arts therapies is harness that…for individual treatment goals."
Dr. Templeton explains how something like dance-based therapy works. A typical early session is similar to a talk therapy model, but builds to something more holistic.
"It’s an awkward transition: communication through words to communicating through movement," she says. But since movement can express things that can’t be expressed in language, "How do we create a relationship through movement?"
Ultimately, integrating elements of movement and dance helps the patient "experience the body in new ways," with new methods of sensation and feeling grounded that "reverberate" through a person’s mind and feelings, to effect change in his or her behavior.
Examples of this include body stances that underscore healthy boundaries and standing up to others, or movement and balance exercises that help the patient revise crippling black-and-white ways of thinking. Exploring these ideas through the body, and not just through conversation, "can be translated to a conceptual, reframing level" that improves the patient’s daily life, says Dr. Templeton.
To learn more about services available at the Parkway Health and Wellness Clinic, call 215-553-7012.
Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Sources: Dr. Sue Smith, Dr. Sharon Goodill, and Dr. Elizabeth Templeton, Drexel University Department of Creative Arts Therapy