BE CRAFTY ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH

THIS week I discovered a new book called Craftfulness: Mend Yourself By Making Things. Craftfulness, it seems, is the next ‘big thing’ to help boost our mental health.

According to its practitioners, combines positive psychology and neuroscience with mankind’s inherent desire to ‘create’ in a technique that relaxes and heals the mind.

The key is to focus actively on a task that often involves an element of repetition — such as sewing, knitting, model-making, painting etc.

This approach is in direct contrast to mindfulness, the fashionable psychological fad of the past decade, which revolves around ‘living in the moment’, and is both passive and introspective.

As someone who’s taught mindfulness to patients, I rather think craftfulness might have the edge. Some years ago, while I was working with patients with severe, complex mental health problems, a new member of staff started a mindfulness course. I was astounded at the difference it made. People who’d been overwhelmed by their emotional stress, were transformed.

For a time, I was convinced that mindfulness was the answer to all problems. But then the course ended and that same colleague started a new project — forming a gardening group. The impact on patients was no less dramatic.

It was then I realised that the therapeutic effect had more to do with my colleague and his way of talking and interacting with patients than it did with the technique he used.

However, I also saw that gardening as therapy also had a significant advantage over mindfulness. It was social, it got patients outdoors, and it was rewarding for them to see the effects of their labour.

Most of our patients carried on gardening even when my colleague moved on. This was in marked contrast to mindfulness, which nearly all our patients stopped doing once the course ended.

That’s not to say mindfulness doesn’t have a place, but I know that it’s not the panacea I once believed it to be.

The ‘distraction’ that craftfulness offers is precisely what many people struggling with mental health issues need. It also fulfils a deepseated human need to create.

Our minds are never freer than when they’re concentrating on doing.