Three New Canaan Organizations Collaborate on Art Therapy

Silver Hill Hospital has launched an integrated art therapy experience this summer for patients from its Adolescent Transitional Living Program at the Silvermine Arts Center, thanks to a $5,000 grant by the New Canaan Community Foundation.

The program, a collaboration between Silver Hill Hospital and the Silvermine Arts Center, enables patients to leave the Silver Hill campus once a week in order to learn new visual artistic skills, as well as enhance preexisting skills, according to those involved in it.

“We started prior to the grant working with Silvermine Arts Center, because they are the preeminent arts guild in Fairfield County and they are right up the street from us, and I was struck by the fortuitous colocation of our two facilities,” said Dr. Aaron Krasner, chief of the Adolescent Transitional Living Program. “I was also developing our internal art therapy program at the time, and I thought it was match made in heaven.”

Krasner found the arts to be an important part in his patients’ recoveries, a conclusion grounded in scientific basis and study. Thanks to the NCCF grant, Sunday sessions will see participants work in various media, including hand-built ceramics, printmaking, sculpture and multimedia painting.

“Creative expression and what I like to call adjunctive therapeutic activities are very important for adolescents who are engaged in serious psychotherapy and other psychosocial interventions,” Krasner said. “There is a link between artistic expression and mental illness that has recently been substantiated genetically.”

Krasner cites Vincent Van Gogh, the artist who famously struggled with mental illness, as well as the studies of Sigmund Freud as a way of highlighting the link between artistic expression and mental illness.

“If you speak with people in recovery, either from substance abuse disorders or other major mental disorders, they will tell you that creative expression is a very important part of the healing process,” Krasner said. “And this traces back to the earliest work in psychotherapy pioneered by Sigmund Freud. Abreaction is essentially the expression of internal distress in a psychotherapeutic context.”

New Canaan Community FoundationExecutive Director Cynthia Gorey, together with the board that makes decisions on grants, agreed with Krasner’s assertions.

“Silver Hill Hospital and Silvermine Arts Center are very close to each other, they’re about a mile and a half away, and yet they really have not had too many collaborative efforts in the past,” Gorey said.

“We really like the grant request because it was two organizations that would benefit from one grant, and it was essentially a new program. This was going to be the first time [Silver Hill] would take their patients to the Silvermine Arts Center. It seemed like a win-win: It helps both organizations and the patients, and it may become a model for future treatment programs for these kids.”

Gorey also was happy at what the grant could establish as far as community prominence for both parties involved.

“It is also another way that we can reinforce that both Silvermine Arts Center and Silver Hill Hospital are really a part of the New Canaan community,” she said. “They are sort of on the outskirts of town so people do not necessarily think about them every day, like they might the library they drive by five times a day, but these organizations are just as critical a part of our community to make our community whole.”

Silvermine Arts Center Executive Director Leslee Asch emphasized how much the art therapy would help the patients themselves.

“Silvermine Arts Center is delighted to partner with our neighbors at Silver Hill Hospital,” Asch said in an email. “We know the art projects we do with  their teens will contribute to their sense of completion, collaboration and most importantly self-esteem.”

Krasner also noted that the program is very different from other therapeutic treatments the typical patient might receive.

“This is not a therapy group. They are not there to talk about their feelings,” Krasner said. “They are there to learn the discipline of art and why that is so important is that it gives patients…an opportunity to develop artistic sills which then enables them to express themselves in a more nuanced way, which has intrinsic therapeutic value. Also, some of my patients are very artistically inclined; I’d say half. Some of them are accomplished artists, and giving them more skills may down the road give them a means of harnessing their creative expressive capacity in a more formal way, which might offer them a vocation.”

Krasner has observed that the program has not only been widely embraced by the patients but also been beneficial for their sense of connection.

“Fostering a sense of connection is a very important process, because mental illness tends to cause isolation and disruption in normative attachments,” Krasner said. “The kids love it. They have a chance to give formal feedback, and they really have liked this; it’s been really significant.”