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A Student Blog on the 2015 Power of the Arts National Forum – Art: It’s Just What the Doctor Ordered

Alicia Haniford poses with a friend.

Health – both mental and physical – was a hot topic at this year’s Power of the Arts National Forum, and for good reason; based on all the projects covered by Saturday’s workshop and Sunday’s dialogue sessions, there’s a lot going on when it comes to pairing these two together.

The discussion wasn’t relegated to the professionals, though. It really started on Friday night, when singer Kellylee Evans got up on stage and told us she’d been “frappé par la foudre.” In French, she said, this can mean one of two things: that you’ve fallen in love (here everyone giggled) or, literally, that you’ve been struck by lightning.

For her, it was the literal sense that held true.

The chances of being struck by lightning in Canada, according to the superficial and questionably reliable Google search I just did, are slightly less than one in a million for any given year. And for most people – certainly for me – that’s all it is: a statistic, convenient for comparing against your chances of winning the lottery or getting attacked by a shark but not much else.

What you don’t think about is the aftermath. The recovery. And what kept Kellylee motivated to recover, to work past the limitations of a one-in-slightly-less-than-a-million accident, was her music. She wanted to keep touring, keep singing, keep playing guitar and ukulele.

If the story sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard something similar before, in various iterations. Maybe it’s even something you’ve experienced yourself. When one of the presenters asked participants in Saturday’s Mental and Physical Health workshop to think back to a hard time in their life and share what helped get them through it, there were certainly a lot of people whose answers involved some form of art, from singing in a choir to dancing to painting.

My answer, unsurprisingly, was books—either reading them or writing them. If I’m upset or stressed out, there’s nothing like submerging myself in the beauty of someone else’s reality (or struggling to create my own) to help me out. Like other forms of art, it gives you an opportunity for self-expression—an opportunity, moreover, where you’re in complete control. It’s a pretty powerful experience, one many people gravitate towards intuitively.

What’s interesting, though, is where it starts to go beyond intuition. The moderator for Saturday’s workshop on mental and physical health was a doctor himself, and he opened by saying that the medical profession has a lot to learn from the arts. Medicine is heavily curative right now, when it needs to start being more promotive. And combining the two isn’t just an fun thought experiment: for all of the presenters, and for a significant portion of the audience, it’s a reality. It’s their job.

Between the workshop’s three presentations – put on by representatives from Ontario’s ARTS-REHAB project and B.C’s On the Map project, plus an independent study by M.A. candidate Janet Creery – a few things started to become obvious. One: it’s important – essential, even – to start developing a whole-body approach to healing. We tend to focus on the physical, but how you feel about yourself and your life depends on a whole lot more than how well your body works. Two: the people who run arts-and-health related projects need taking care of too. If you’re running a small program in a small community, it’s easy to start feeling isolated; just like any other profession, there need to be opportunities for networking and sharing resources and knowledge. Three: arts-and-health programs can’t be all about art, nor can they be all about health. It’s all about being interdisciplinary, from research to implementation.