Art Therapy and Creative Aging

Reclaiming Elderhood, Health and Wellbeing

Raquel Chapin Stephenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000408331
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Art Therapy and Creative Aging offers an integrated perspective on engaging with older people through the arts. Drawing from the author's clinical, research and teaching experiences, the book explores how arts engagement can intertwine with and support healthy aging.

This book combines analysis of current development theory, existing research on creative programs with elders, and case examples of therapeutic experience to critically examine ageism and demonstrate how art therapy and creative aging approaches can harness our knowledge of the cognitive and emotional development of older adults. Chapters cover consideration of generational, cultural, and historical factors; the creative, cognitive and emotional developmental components of aging; arts and art therapy techniques and methods with older adults with differing needs; and examples of best practices.

Creative arts therapists, creative aging professionals, and students who seek foundational concepts and ideas for arts practice with older people will find this book instrumental in developing effective ways of using the arts to promote health and well-being and inspire engagement with this often-underserved population.

1   Introduction

I was very close to my grandparents. I loved being around them and their friends, so it felt natural for me to choose to work with older adults. I value older people, and I saw a huge need for services for them. Most of my classmates wanted to work with children, but none, other than me, chose to work with older people. My grandmother, again and again, encouraged me to focus my work on children. She would say, “Raquel, why would you want to work with older people? Why not work with children whose lives are just beginning and where you could make a real difference?” Although I had taken her advice on so many other occasions, clearly I did not follow it this time. I wondered, Does she really believe that a younger life is more valuable than an older one? Had she bought in to our society’s bias against age? I wish I had asked her these questions at the time.

My career as an art therapist has been so joyful – well beyond the enjoyment I anticipated at the outset of graduate school. When my clients experience comfort and joy, I understand and know this by a kind of natural reciprocity. This is at the root of my fascination and delight in working with this population. One of my main goals now as a teacher has been to share the joy I feel in working with elders in hopes of encouraging new therapists to choose to work with them as well. Although there are a limited number of available jobs and a small number of people trained to do this work, there is a great need for it.

The subtitle of this book, Reclaiming Elderhood, Health and Well-being is intended to reframe the way the latter part of life is viewed. In many ways, American society views elderhood as a long extension of adulthood, without accepting it as its own developmental time and stage. Geriatricians Bill Thomas (2014) and Louise Aronson (2019) speak of reclaiming elderhood by understanding older adults from their unique perspective and assets; elderhood, in their view, is the third act following childhood and adulthood. Aging is not only about biological decline. That’s part of it, of course, but it is also about growth. Older adults possess so many attributes that are overlooked and misunderstood and many that have not even been discovered.

Purpose of the Book

This book is for creative arts therapists, creative aging professionals, and students who seek foundational concepts and ideas for practice. Although it contains many practical tips drawn from my experience in the field, it is not a how-to guide for initiating art or art therapy activities with elders or people with dementia. Rather, its aim is to inspire the application of arts engagement with older people in the broadest way possible. Art Therapy and Creative Aging offers an integrated perspective, drawing on the ideas of creative aging and current knowledge of the cognitive and emotional development of older adulthood, a unique stage of life.

I hope it will inspire older people, their families, and all stakeholders in the care of elders, to imagine new ways to engage them in arts for the betterment of their health and well-being.

My Limitations

I am a middle-class, middle-aged, white American woman, originally from the Midwest, and the approach to creative engagement presented in this book is inevitably influenced by my lived experience. My professional experience has been primarily on the East Coast of the United States and in large urban and suburban cities. In my community-based work, the majority of participants, although they represent each socioeconomic class and diverse cultural backgrounds, have also been white and of European descent. They were able to participate in these community-based programs because they possessed the financial means, mobility, proximity, or caregiver support.

At the inpatient geriatric psychiatry hospital unit where I also worked, my patients were more diverse racially, culturally, medically, and in terms of age. Many did not have the financial or social resources to soften the ravages of mental or dementing illness. I recognize the wide disparities in how Black and indigenous people, all people of color, and other marginalized older people fare in many areas, including health, longevity, and access and quality of care, to name a few. The Covid-19 pandemic has only widened the chasm, evidenced by a higher rate of infection and death.

Learning from this book needs to be extracted with a critical lens and applied with awareness to people across race, ethnicity, gender, age, and religious and sexual orientation.

My Inspiration

I can’t even begin to count how many conversations I’ve had with colleagues, friends, and family members who sink into worry about preserving functioning, beauty, and health. Rarely do we discuss the emerging freedoms gained as we age. And yet, many older people have told me they are happier later in life than they were as a younger person.

People like Adeena, who, after retiring, had a tremendous passion for making art and devoted most of her time and energy to it! Or Marina, who, despite coping with significant arthritic pain each and every day, came to the studio to make art in community. Their openness to learning something new about themselves left its mark on the way I see aging and my vision of how the arts can improve lives in a multitude of ways.

Older people have inspired me. I have heard from them the many interesting experiences they have had in life, and they have shared so much wisdom and experience. But what has been most meaningful for me is the resilience displayed by those elders who have endured immense loss and change.

A Few Words About Terms

Most often, I refer to the people in this book as “older people.” The term describes a segment of the population who are more advanced in their stage of development relative to others while at the same time implicitly acknowledging that all of us are getting older, not just adults. At other times, I will refer to these same people as “elders” as a means of respect and valuing the unique stage of life called “elderhood.” The terms used in this book for the consumers of arts engagement include “artist,” “participant,” and “client.” I have been careful to name a person as a client only when they have been referred to clinical treatment.

The terms used to describe the arts engagement practitioner in this book are more specific, at times, referring to the professional “art therapist,” “creative arts therapist,” or “teaching artist.” At other times, I use “arts in health practitioner” to refer to the wider field of those who work in the arts with older people, including, but not limited to, therapists and teaching artists.

State of Aging in America

There is much that concerns me about growing old in the United States. We haven’t yet figured out how to embrace the aging of our society, to see it as a gift that could benefit us all. Instead, the conversation is focused on the global decline in births and increase in lifespan. We hear that dementia is on the rise and that the baby boomers will drain Social Security as they reach retirement age en masse. Beauty products and pharmaceuticals are marketed to our fear of aging and promise to roll back time. (As if we could!) We are looking at aging all wrong.

Rather than see older people as targets for youth-promoting, turn-back-time products and fear-mongering about all that will sag, wrinkle, and break as we age, we would do far better to celebrate lived experience. We should truly honor our elders not only because they are intrinsically worthy of respect but also because we value those qualities that improve and expand with age – qualities like wisdom, creativity, and problem solving, to name a few. If we reframe what it means to grow old from this perspective, we can redesign our interaction with aging – our own, that of our loved ones, and the aging of our society.

What are the ingredients of a joyful elderhood? As I write this, I am years from being considered an elder, but I have been fortunate to know many older people who are joyful in their later life. Can we reframe our perspective on aging, shifting negative ageist stereotypes to recognition of new and different attributes and opportunities that are – or could be – gained in later life?

Research and innovative practice help us to understand how old age is different than ageist rhetoric has led us to believe. We know more about the aging brain and its potential and unique capacity. There are countless opportunities for elders to reframe their own vision and engage with life. It has prompted a new way of understanding aging – not as a stage of decline and decrepitude but one of hope, joy, and possibility.

Health and Well-Being Are Human Rights

The health and well-being of older people are human rights. We need to better understand the lived experience of all communities of older people and make policy changes that serve their real needs. Our current dominant biomedical paradigm of care supersedes the choice of the older person when that paradigm conflicts with their lived experience. Moving toward relational and contextual paradigms of care, where the perspective and experience of the older person is centered and valued, will align medical care and social services to a more ethical continuum of care and toward, as Bill Thomas (2014) proposes, “a life worth living.”

Understanding how life is valued from an older person’s perspective has led to a reevaluation and recalibration of the measures we use. Aronson (2019) paints her experience as a geriatrician with broad strokes of science and the humanities to offer a rich, nuanced perspective of aging that is full of “joy, wonder, frustration, outrage and hope about old age, medicine and American life” (p. xiii). Gwande (2014) suggests that we shift from simply prolonging life at all costs to valuing quality of life, yielding a perspective in which an older person is empowered to assert their own definition of a life worth living. Thomas (2014) emphasizes how human beings cooperate with others to exist across the lifespan. “We grow, mature, and then age, and at every point along this journey, our well-being is tightly interwoven with that of those around us. Aging changes the nature, not the fact, of our reliance on others. Aging is the ultimate team sport” (p. 69). Finally, Thomas identifies three main factors that determine well-being: strength, purpose, and belonging. Strength is needed in order to live life on our own terms, purpose is needed to have a reason to live, and belonging is needed because it is essential to have relationships and to be included in community.

Of course, growing old is not without its perils, especially for those who are poor or in poor health. But it is important to not ignore the unique attributes that older adults possess and to use them to build bridges of connection and health engagement. Among these attributes are increased creativity, increased ability for risk-taking and spontaneity, a greater capacity for solving complex problems, and a greater ability to navigate complicated interpersonal, social, and politically charged situations.

In the Pages Ahead

Art Therapy and Creative Aging offers an overview of the ways arts engagement is an effective path toward health, well-being, and joy in later life. While arts engagement is hardly new, we are learning more about how our capacity for creativity expands with age, as shown in the stories of Rose, Adeena, and Marcia in chapter 2 and in the research on creativity in chapter 3. Chapter 4 presents a framework that readers can use to explore their own generational perspective in relation to someone from another generation. Chapters 5–9 offer details of creative arts in practice with older people, such as the intersections of care available, from the expressive therapies to arts in health (chapter 5), the goals of arts engagement (chapter 6), the structure of the arts encounter (chapter 7), and a discussion of art materials in chapter 8. Lastly, chapter 9 explores art-making with people who have dementia.

Art experiences can help people realign their sense of self to embrace the wisdom that comes with the changes in thinking, feeling, and behaving that occur in later life. Art, for many people, is a transcendent experience, one that allows for the past, present, and future to co-exist at once. Through engagement in the arts, powerful and meaningful emotional content can be expressed, examined, and recollected with changed understanding or purpose.

Arts engagement fosters joy, celebrates life, and promotes health and well-being in a variety of ways, and contributes to a life worth living. This book presents concepts, research, and theories that support this claim and methods for how to implement it.

References

• Aronson, L. (2019). Elderhood: Redefining aging, transforming medicine, reimagining life. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
• Gwande, A. (2014). Being mortal: Medicine and what matters in the end. New York: Metropolitan Books.
• Thomas, B. (2014). Second wind: Navigating the passage to a slower, deeper, and more connected life. New York: Simon and Schuster.

2 A Portrait of Three Older Artists

Rose, Adeena, and Marcia are elders I had the good fortune to interview for my doctoral research about the experience of people who choose to make art later in life. They shared with me many aspects of their lives, and their stories, combined with those of countless old...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Portrait of Three Older Artists
• 3 The Reciprocal Influence of Art and Aging
• 4 Back in My Day
• 5 Intersections of Care
• 6 Identity, Connection, and Motivation
• 7 Structure and Process
• 8 Art Media
• 9 Art and Dementia
• Epilogue
• Index