Inpatient art therapy: implications and applications for training.

After months of preliminary meetings and discussions among ourselves, as well as with hospital administrators and unit staff, the first art therapy group on our inpatient service was formed. Because of the newness of this modality on this inpatient unit, caution and close scrutiny by its staff were not surprising. In fact, this served to promote a greater commitment to our project. A brief description of our inpatient unit and its structure may help the reader to understand the environment in which the groups were conducted. The ward consisted of 36 beds with a patient population that was mixed racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically. The average length of stay was 24 days. At the interdisciplinary staffteam meeting to which the therapists were assigned, potential group members were discussed and chosen on the basis of patient manageability, disregarding diagnosis. Patients were invited to join the group after the weekly patient-staff rounds in which the entire team (patients and staff) met. Patients were told that they were welcome to join an art activity group aimed at developing better communication through a cooperative task. Those invited to participate in the group always had the option to decline. We planned to focus on the interpersonal relationships in the group. Our aim was to understand, evaluate, and assess those interpersonal skills that reflect individual ego functions. We were eager to employ our interest in art and our training as therapists in treating patients. We felt a particular need for a creative and expressive modality in our residency training program because the first year of this program focused on psychopharmacologically augmented verbal psychotherapy. We proposed that using a nonverbal modality might allow for exploration of feelings and ideas in a less threatening way.