By Gaetana
Nuccia Cammara and Francesca Picone with
Editing for English by Catherine West
Gaetana Nuccia Cammara, Social Worker at UOC Dependencies
Pathology ASP Palermo, Photographer, Project Manager of the “Palermo: uno
sguardo a fuoco” and "L'Arte che cura" projects, manager for Ce.P.A.V. (Visual Arts Permanent Center)
of the ASP of Palermo.
Francesca Picone, Psychiatrist, Analyst Psychologist, Manager
for U.O.S. Sert ASP Palermo, Trainer, Lecturer and Supervisor at CIPA Institute
for Southern Italy and Sicily, co-host of the Art laboratory within the CIPA
School of Psychotherapy since 2009. Collaborator with Art and Psyche Working
Group for Art and Psyche in Sicily, Syracuse Sept. 2015.
Art possesses a strong
transformative value, inherent in the creative process, capable of producing a
particular state of well-being, in the moment in which it is experienced.
During the process of artistic
production, the inner images and the real and social dimension of oneself, meet
and integrate, facilitating in the person the perception and the listening of
the emotions and the internal sensations; this experience can generate new
insights and can lead one to experiment with alternative actions to those
already known.
The creative experience is
characterized by the playful spirit. It is direct, immediate but effective at
the same time. All this differs from Art Therapy which instead provides
settings, times, methods and techniques, typical of a structured therapeutic
path. Generally, the health worker who works in personal care services
unwillingly accepts to participate in structured training courses for
therapeutic purposes. This is why the Art and Social Change project chose to
design training centered on a participatory methodological approach that
involves the use of Art and not of Art therapy. We seek to activate in health
workers a creative, unstructured that is freeing. Thereby it is
non-therapeutic: it is a guide to favoring empowerment and re-motivation. Stimulating
creative opportunities in such health workers can enhance their empathic
capacity and emotional vocabulary, important protective factors that can
produce personal well-being, strengthen motivation and prevent stress and
demotivation in the workplace. Studies confirm a close link between improving
the interpersonal skills of health workers and increasing the quality of life
of patients and their families.
The training program of Art &
Social Change is divided into several group workshops, in which, within a
framework that involves the use of different channels of expression, and that
starting from a theme proposed by the artist, allows each person to experience his
or her own artistic product.
The preliminary research that the
partnership has conducted on the state of the art within the countries involved
in the project, show that this training experience appears particularly
innovative in the health care sector. The
experiences, for addiction health workers in institutional settings are few or
totally absent. This innovation is closely related to the concept of promoting
a new way of training professionals through Art, which starting from the
individual well-being of the individual professional reaches a transformation
of the communication and relational modalities, with consequent improvement of
the therapeutic relationship with the final beneficiaries (recoverists).
