Art therapy can reduce stress in India

NEW DELHI, India: How often have you walked the corridors of a hospital and wondered why paintings are placed on the walls? Or why is there such finer detailing put in for the colour and objects placed in a therapy room? Well, experts suggest that art in any creative form helps in reducing stress, induces a happy ambience and makes one feel at ease— both for the patients and the extended family who maybe under stress.

Medical doctor Khushboo Shah, founder of Earthlings, said that art therapy technically also known as expressive art therapy includes visual mediums, so basically painting, colouring, crafts, playing with materials or even dance movements.

“It could be anything which includes riddles and drum circles too. Any form of art which helps in expressions. However, it has to be facilitated by a facilitator, who can take you to a place beyond expression and actually make a change,” said Shah.

Creating a space

One- on- one sessions of therapy tend to get scary or scaring for certain individuals. In such times, expressive art therapies help patients open up and vent through a medium. “It becomes easier for them to say what they want, maybe through a sketch or a dance move or a caricature. For example, I apply Access Consciousness, which offers self- empowering and pragmatic tools to change things in your life that you haven’t been able to change until now. Access Consciousness provides you with ways to become totally aware and to begin to function as the conscious being who you truly are,” added Khushboo.

Experts should definitely recommend it. City-based colour therapist Namrata Sharma believes colors bring out certain chemicals in the brain which help people express and this further facilitates healing.

Take for example, In Jehangir Hospital, art is everywhere—be it the old world tiles, the stained glass windows, the glass mosaic or even the photographs by the chairman Jehangir H C Jehangir.