Smoke gets in your eyes, sometimes

Some people's lives are filled with joy, each day bringing new opportunities for fulfillment. Other people face new tragedies with each sunrise. Lizzie learned to live within this world. For forty years the horror of an existence inside a mental hospital's walls described her life, where even a day-pass to attend a funeral was unheard of. Now, Lizzie lives in a boarding home. She visits the bank, sometimes alone, for money to buy cigarettes and nail polish. Her friends accompany her to the corner coffee shop where they stare into space over their coffee cups. No, Lizzie has'nt recovered the time she has lost. She speaks most while she is drawing, but now at least she has the option to draw and to speak to someone, someone still struggling to understand.     

Rethinking adolescent art therapy treatment

Clinical Art Therapy has been a preferred method for adolescent treatment, both individual and group, in many mental health clinics during the past several decades. This paper questions if this premise still holds true for the adolescent youth of the 90's. Accelerated stimulus has resulted in accelerated developmental pressure without adequate time for the developmental integration of adolescent tasks. An approach to art therapy treatment that takes the changing socio-economic, family, and peer influences into consideration is the subject of this essay. ... problems facing America cluster around the values and culture of the society:... a deepening race and poverty problem, widespread crime and violence, the spread of a massive drug culture, the inbreeding of social hopelessness, the profusion of sexual license, the massive propagation of moral corruption by the visual media, a decline in civic consciousness, [and] the emergence of potentially divisive multiculturalism...