Promoting Social Inclusion through Art
The vision of the ART4PSY project is to set up sustainable European cooperation for using art as a way to promote social inclusion for mental health patients and create new career opportunities.
Closely connected with this vision is the ambition to develop the structures and personal resources necessary for longitudinal, large-scale, international cooperation toward this goal.
For this purpose, part of the project was dedicated to the development of a toolkit, which will gather methodology, good practices, activities, and other material and can be used by mental health practitioners from all over the world.
Another part of the project was a digital library where the artwork of mental health patients from all over the world will be exhibited and promoted. Due to the project’s multidisciplinarity, practice-orientation and specificity, there is a lot to gain from having mental health experts, artists and mental health patients working together to develop innovative methods to connect art and mental health.
Project duration: 36 months (December 1st, 2018 – November 30th, 2021)
Website: www.art4psy.eu
Activities
Art4Psy project has included the development and implementation of three ART4PSY festivals (one in each country; Greece, Czech Republic, and Belgium), which include theatrical performance (starting from writing the play and going all the way to the show), painting exhibition, and photography exhibition.
Finally, an ambition of the project has been to ensure the sustainability of ART4PSY, i.e., setting up structures such as the digital library, the toolkit, networking with mental health units from other countries, etc.
Participants
Adults with Mental Health problems and Professionals.
“A lesson to every mental health professional,
A lesson in attitude towards life,
A lesson in human relationships,
A lesson in what recovery is…
It’s hard for words to cover the result.”
-Mental health user