{"id":18589,"date":"2015-11-19T11:32:08","date_gmt":"2015-11-19T16:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?p=18589"},"modified":"2026-03-26T09:59:31","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T13:59:31","slug":"a-student-blog-on-the-2015-power-of-the-arts-national-forum-art-its-just-what-the-doctor-ordered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/2015\/a-student-blog-on-the-2015-power-of-the-arts-national-forum-art-its-just-what-the-doctor-ordered\/","title":{"rendered":"A Student Blog on the 2015 Power of the Arts National Forum – Art: It\u2019s Just What the Doctor Ordered"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n A Student Blog on the 2015 Power of the Arts National Forum – Art: It\u2019s Just What the Doctor Ordered\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n
\"Alicia<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Health \u2013 both mental and physical \u2013 was a hot topic at this year\u2019s Power of the Arts National Forum<\/a>, and for good reason; based on all the projects covered by Saturday\u2019s workshop and Sunday\u2019s dialogue sessions, there\u2019s a lot going on when it comes to pairing these two together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The discussion wasn\u2019t relegated to the professionals, though. It really started on Friday night, when singer Kellylee Evans got up on stage and told us she\u2019d been \u201cfrapp\u00e9 par la foudre.\u201d In French, she said, this can mean one of two things: that you\u2019ve fallen in love (here everyone giggled) or, literally, that you\u2019ve been struck by lightning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For her, it was the literal sense that held true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 certainly for me \u2013 that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the story sounds familiar, it\u2019s probably because you\u2019ve heard something similar before, in various iterations. Maybe it\u2019s even something you\u2019ve experienced yourself. When one of the presenters asked participants in Saturday\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My answer, unsurprisingly, was books\u2014either reading them or writing them. If I\u2019m upset or stressed out, there\u2019s nothing like submerging myself in the beauty of someone else\u2019s reality (or struggling to create my own) to help me out. Like other forms of art, it gives you an opportunity for self-expression\u2014an opportunity, moreover, where you\u2019re in complete control. It\u2019s a pretty powerful experience, one many people gravitate towards intuitively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s interesting, though, is where it starts to go beyond intuition. The moderator for Saturday\u2019s 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\u2019t just an fun thought experiment: for all of the presenters, and for a significant portion of the audience, it\u2019s a reality. It\u2019s their job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between the workshop\u2019s three presentations \u2013 put on by representatives from Ontario\u2019s ARTS-REHAB project and B.C\u2019s On the Map project, plus an independent study by M.A. candidate Janet Creery \u2013 a few things started to become obvious. One: it\u2019s important \u2013 essential, even \u2013 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\u2019re running a small program in a small community, it\u2019s 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\u2019t be all about art, nor can they be all about health. It\u2019s all about being interdisciplinary, from research to implementation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Health \u2013 both mental and physical \u2013 was a hot topic at this year\u2019s Power of the Arts National Forum, and for good reason; based on all the projects covered by Saturday\u2019s workshop and Sunday\u2019s dialogue sessions, there\u2019s a lot going on when it comes to pairing these two together. The discussion wasn\u2019t relegated to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[159,26,52,44,162,154,25,849],"tags":[155],"class_list":["post-18589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alicia","category-english","category-events","category-for-students","category-news-original","category-power-of-the-arts","category-student-blogs","category-student-voices","tag-power-of-the-arts-2015"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18589"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53678,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18589\/revisions\/53678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}