Holistic care
In the clinical care system, the art therapist must fit in unobtrusively with the doctors, nurses, occupational therapists, social workers, etc., who constitute the medical profession wherein each member plays a well-defined role. But in so doing, an art therapist can still redirect the focus of healing away from the old emphasis on "illness" to a new emphasis on "life," the object of holistic health care.
After medical staff have given up attempting to actually cure the disease, a terminal ward patient faces life's final test, to persevere in the face of the cruelty of fate, anger, inevitability, and a sense of helplessness. Hsu Li-li says, "For those patients on the verge of death, detachment alone allows them to pass on without remorse." According to 1999 statistics from the Palliative Care Ward of National Taiwan University Hospital, the rate of acceptance of music therapy by terminally ill patients was very high, at 86.6%. From this we can recognize that the effectiveness of art therapy, a humanized approach to health care, is quite high.
There was one patient who was hard of hearing. As soon as the nurses or orderlies entered the ward, they would hear this individual carrying on in a loud voice. Music therapist Hsu Li-li had him sit next to the speaker and feel the rhythm of the sound waves booming forth. In the end, this elderly gentlemen developed such a fondness for "listening to music" that shortly before his death he wrote a short essay in which he said, "Music opened a door into my heart and allowed me to enter another world, to forget the pains of my illness, the misery of my past, and to rouse my spirit to enter another realm." From this single example we can appreciate the extent to which music can lift the spirits.
In fact, Hsu Li-li's transition to music therapy from music education was motivated by her own experience. She was born into a doctor's family. Following a stroke and hospitalization in Japan, her mother sank into a state of depression. When music student Hsu Li-li heard her mother's main doctor say to the family, "Let her listen to music!" Hsu began looking for music that would boost her mother's spirits.
For the sake of her rehabilitation, Hsu Li-li would often take her mother to the department store. But in front of a moving escalator, her mother would freeze, unable to move. Only when they sang a Japanese nursery rhyme together, or sang the lyrics to a children's song, "Go, go, go, hand in little hand, we go," was her mother able to easily step foreward onto the escalator. The power of music far transcends what people may imagine.
With regard to those who have been living in fear of SARS, the soft-spoken Hsu Li-li proclaims: "Give yourself over to the music, dare to make it part of your life!"
As part of the medical system, art therapy can be thought of as that most pleasant, most elegant of medicines. Art therapy, which gives its patients a brush, has them set their body in motion in dance, or merge with the rhythms of music, is like a beautiful multicolored rainbow that bridges the chasm between the sunken spirit of the patient and the therapist.
"I worry about drifting aimlessly and never returning. I worry about giving up things. I worry even more about poverty of spirit. I see the lights along the streets, but those are other peoples' homes. My fate vacillates aimlessly and finally runs its course"-Sheng Cheng-te.
Victims of the September 21 earthquake of 1999 continue to come forward to seek help with the accumulated stresses of life in the disaster area since then. The photo shows art therapist Liona Lu conducting a group therapy session with some of them. (courtesy of Liona Lu)