Making art with and without patients in acute settings

An increasing number of art therapists in the UK are making art alongside their patients. Although this practice is fairly well established in the US, it is marginalised within UK art therapy discourse. There needs to be more transparency about it so that the benefits for patients can be clarified and guidelines developed. Using vignettes from current work with disturbed patients in a Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit, I will describe how I use art making as a way of negotiating the particular problems of in-patient art therapy. I will argue that doing so is not only helpful for the art therapist but, more importantly, it is beneficial for the patient.