Abstract

This resource comprises a collection of accessible, flexible, tried-and-tested activities for use with people in a range of care settings, to help them explore their knowledge of themselves and to make sense of their experiences.

Among the issues addressed by the activities are exploring physical changes, emotional trauma, interpersonal problems and spiritual dilemmas. Featuring individual and group activities of varying difficulty, including card making, painting to music, meditation, and body mapping, it also includes real-life anecdotes that bring the techniques to life.

The Expressive Arts Activity Book is full of fun, easy, creative ideas for workers in hospitals, clinics, schools, hospices, spiritual and religious settings, and in private practice.

You've made a fabulous book. I delight in all the modalities of all the activities you describe, and am especially moved by your tone, and the way you weave in countless stories of putting them in use with people in various stages of health and morale in the hospital setting. The difficulties and 'failures' are as helpful to read as the enthusiastic 'successes'.
Email endorsement by Joanna Macy
This book has my unequivocal endoresement. I can imagine myself impletmenting many of the activities that Darley and Heath so competently and generously offer us. Not only would these activities serve the needs of my own patients and students but they would help me meet my own professional obligation in terms of reflective practice. I also find myself looking ahead to practising some self care in implementing many of their suggestions for being present to ourselves. I thank Darley and Heath for nurturing and sustaining those of us who live to affirm (along with them) the deep and abiding power of art.
The Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal
It goes far beyond most psychology and educational guides to offer a set of creative ideas and excercises hospital workers, schools and other caregivers can use in the daily course of their interactions. It's an invaluable workbook that health collections will find important'.
The Midwest Book Review
A state-of-the-art book, filled with creative practical techniques, thoughtful advice and lessons from excellent case examples that all healthcare practitioners-physicians and allied healthcare professionals alike-can apply for the therapeutic and health-promoting benefits for their patients and clients.
from the Foreword by Gene D. Cohen MD PhD, Director of the Center on Aging, Health and Humanities, Professor of Health Care Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences and The George Washington Society

This is a useful book for professionals who carry out therapeutic work within a healthcare setting.

The book provides ideas on facilitating icebreakers and final sessions as well as poetry and guided imagery; therefore, hospital play specialists would find this a useful resource.

PlayWords magazine - common Threads
Suzanne Darley has worked in arts and education for over 30 years. She holds an MA in East-West Psychology and is a certified Expressive Arts Educator. She has worked in primary health care settings for three years at the Marin General Hospital, Greenbrae, California, and California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and is currently teaching at San Francisco Waldorf High School. Wende Heath is a Clinical Therapist, a board certified Art Therapist and a registered Expressive Arts Therapist with over twenty years of therapeutic and art experience in a variety of healthcare settings. She developed and directed the Expressive Arts Program for the Institute of Health and Healing at Marin General Hospital, Greenbrae, California, and California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. She is a consultant for the Society for the Arts in Healthcare and is an Arts and Culture commissioner for the city of Richmond, California.