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The Indiana Daily Student

arts

Intimate event at The Venue features therapy through art

Carmen Levasseur leads a session called When Art Heals for Suicide Prevention Week at The Venue on Tuesday night.She explains the process of how art heals the mind and demonstrates with hands on projects, including filling a circle with anything that comes to mind and filling in family crest with positive attributes about one's self.

The Venue Fine Arts & Gift’s Tuesday evening events offer a variety of perspectives each week. Community members ranging from artists to scholars come in to share their points of view on creativity or art and its role in their lives.

This Tuesday’s event took on a more personal tone than the traditional narrative. Instead of the structured lecture with chairs facing the front, the intimate group present for this talk gathered around a small table for an open discussion.

Carmen Levasseur, manager of social work services at Milestones Clinical & Health Resources, led the discussion and highlighted the use of art as therapy in her work.

Michelle Martin-Colman, mother of gallery owner Gabriel Colman, said the healing power of art was the focus of the evening. She said they hoped to bring awareness to the issues related to mental health during September, National Suicide 
Prevention Month.

“What art does when you get down to the actual creation level is it gives the person doing it the opportunity, not to just look at it, but to go through the process of creating it,” Martin-Colman said. “Because of that, you end up healing. We need more of that.”

Levasseur began the brief lecture portion of the event by saying she is not a formal art therapist, though she commonly employs art as a means to help her clients as she has personal experience healing through art therapy for three years.

“I do feel like I am able to help people heal, learn about themselves and other people, through creativity,” Levasseur said. “Some of that is art like paint and drawing, some is music, some is talent — writing is a huge one. Some people come up with their own stuff as they go through the process.”

The theme of the day led most of the discussion for Levasseur.

“We are here primarily to talk about suicide prevention,” 
Levasseur said. “The biggest thing that I can link between suicide prevention and creativity is the idea of people learning to understand themselves and starting to have 
appreciation for parts of themselves — a lot of that can be found within the creative process.”

Sitting down and engaging in creative activity allows clients to put down the defenses they built up over the years, as the creative process opens a part of the mind and spirit that is easy to defend, 
Levasseur said.

Levasseur brought with her a few coloring pages to show the real powers of creativity in positive mental development. A few members of the group threw out their initial ideas for what to do with the blank circle, which Levasseur said is common in her own creative process.

“It is yours,” Levasseur said. “If you are not happy with it, guess what — you can start over.”

Meghan Adcock, behavior therapist with Milestones, said she practices a similar form of therapy with her clients. The idea of everyone’s equal fallibility and acknowledgment of mistakes is one that resonates with those 
engaged in the therapy.

“It kind of shows that vulnerableness and they appreciate that, ‘Oh, you didn’t know what you were doing either,’” Adcock said. “They teach me so much.”

Levasseur asked attendees how they felt at each stage of the process from the first activity of coloring within a circle to the second, a thoughtfully crafted crest that represented what each person was most proud of in their lives.

Martin-Colman said she enjoyed the activities because they allowed her to see her son engaged in the creative work about which he is 
passionate.

Colman said this sort of representational art is where he focuses his artistic 
perspective.

“Being in this business, there’s an adage that has proven itself to be true: the more eccentric the artist, the better the artwork,” Colman said.

For people who are not interested in that particular type of creativity, Levasseur said other forms of expression function similarly for 
therapeutic purposes.

Levasseur brought a page of quotes to distribute. With the quotes, the intention is that the client will write or create a collage based on how that quote resonates with them.

Martin-Colman said the event was a nice way to celebrate Yom Kippur, a day when the anxieties of everyday life are meant to be alleviated.

“I feel better,” Martin-
Colman said.

“What does better feel like?” Lavasseur said.

Martin-Colman smiled at her coloring page.

“I’m supposed to go into this holiday non-stressed,” Martin-Colman said. “This is doing all of that.”

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