Adding insult to injury is the matter of how isolated people with
chronic pain often feel -- they not only must cope with the
physical suffering, but also with the emotional toll of being set
apart from the rest of the world, cut off from physical activities
and feeling like a burden, a whiner, a nag. If only others could
see chronic pain, the way you can look at an injury and imagine
how bad it must hurt or watch the numbers rise on a thermometer
and identify with how sick someone must be to have such a high
fever. Just being understood often can make people feel a
little better and also help the doctor provide better treatment.
One way this is being done today is through art.
HEALING ARTS
Many hospitals in this country now offer some form of art therapy
as a way to help patients express what they are feeling,
emotionally as well as physically. Of course, the experience of
pain has long been portrayed on canvas. For decades, prominent
Yale-trained surgeon and author Bernie Siegel, MD, has encouraged
his patients to demonstrate through art how they felt about their
illness and treatment.
I called Allan I. Basbaum, PhD, pain expert and chair of the
department of anatomy at the University of California, San
Francisco. He is editor-in-chief of Pain, the medical
journal of the International Association for the Study of Pain,
which recently featured cover art from an online exhibition of
work from people expressing their chronic pain. The cover was for
a special issue on women and pain. (To view a sampling of the
exhibition, go to http://link.dhn.bottomlinesecrets.com/r/QUCZJ5/BMF45/LFFZ1/QFKKU/WLTCM/7V/h/.)
Dr. Basbaum enumerated some of the immediate benefits he has seen
patients derive from the exercise of demonstrating what pain feels
like through artwork ...
- It gives people a nonverbal way to express their problem
without being judged or having others get fed up, figuratively
rolling their eyes as if to say "there he/she goes
again." Family and other loved ones are much more
responsive to the person's suffering when they see it on paper,
says Dr. Basbaum.
- Doctors and other health care providers, who are often
confounded on how to appropriately treat a patient with chronic
pain, have more information to work with. Being able to express
the level of pain through imagery can help a patient who may be
under-medicated to make clear what he/she is feeling.
- Art helps express the emotional content in the perception of
pain, Dr. Basbaum said, which can have a healing effect.
"Along with showing the physical aspect of pain, art allows
people to express the powerful psychological aspects of the pain
experience," he says. Because constant pain becomes part of
a person's sense of self, making pain visible to the world helps
them take ownership of it, often bringing some feeling of
control.
THE ARTIST WITHIN
If you have no ability or training in art, you may believe that
attempting to draw physical and/or emotional pain is off-limits
for you. But, Dr. Basbaum strongly disagrees -- lack of artistic
ability or training doesn't matter in the least, he says. For
instance, children who have limited ability to express in words
what they are going through can demonstrate clearly what is
happening to them just using stick figures. He recalls how several
small children suffering from migraine headaches drew simple but
insightful sketches of their pain -- one made a circle to
represent his head and slashed a black X across it... another drew
a similar circle head but added arrows piercing it.
"Artistically speaking, some drawings of pain are good and
some are not, but all of them are expressive," he says, and
that, of course, is the goal.
If you find the concept interesting, but aren't sure how to get
started, here are some ideas to experiment with:
- Make a collage, using materials (or pictures
of items) that have relevance to your pain (for instance, a
prescription label, string tied in knots, a photo of a sharp
knife) to express the intensity, frequency or any other aspect
of pain that you find particularly overwhelming.
- Keep a "sketchbook diary" of
drawings describing your experience with pain, including times
you are immobilized and/or times you can function more normally.
Don't limit yourself to literal images -- try playing with
patterns, scribbles, words and letters, or anything else that
comes to mind. (See more ideas on releasing stress through
drawing at http://link.dhn.bottomlinesecrets.com/r/QUCZJ5/BMF45/LFFZ1/QFKKU/9Z7YF/7V/h/.)
Dr. Basbaum says that he sees no negatives to the practice of
using art to express pain. "It's like chicken soup," he
says, "there is no downside."
Source(s):
Allan I. Basbaum, PhD, chair of the department of anatomy at the
University of California, San Francisco, and editor-in-chief of Pain.
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