I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my book has been
downloaded 15.6K times since it was first published in 2018. It’s also been ‘cited’
(that’s to say other authors have referenced it) fourteen times in articles,
book chapters, proceedings and monographs. Citations are another way of measuring
the impact of an academic book. In terms of where my main readership is,
in the past 12 months it’s been accessed mostly by readers in the US, Australia,
the Netherlands and the UK but it has readers everywhere, from China to Turkey.
It’s good to know that readers and researchers globally still find my ideas on
creativity and wellbeing relevant, five years on.
Tony Gillam
Creativity, wellbeing and mental health
Friday 21 April 2023
Five years …and fifteen thousand readers later
Wednesday 19 October 2022
The difference between intentions and goals
I marvel at my two-year-old granddaughter who spontaneously
flows from one yoga position to another with great effortlessness, without even
knowing what yoga is. It makes me wonder whether yoga wasn’t simply born out of
observing how little children naturally move, before the pressures of grown-up
living cause us to adopt poor posture, to physically seize up and mentally lose
our spontaneity. If yoga were part of the national curriculum would there be
fewer adults with back problems or needing hip and knee replacements?
One aspect of yoga I find interesting is the concept of
‘intentions.’ Sometimes, our yoga teacher will invite us to ‘set an intention,’
which seems to mean identifying a quality that you want to carry with you through
your yoga practice and into the rest of your life beyond the yoga class.
Sometimes, it’s framed in terms of “inviting in an intention.” Some describe this
as a kind of “miniature New Year’s Resolution,” others as bringing awareness to
a quality or virtue you’d like to cultivate for yourself.
I began to ponder on the differences between setting intentions
and setting goals. In my career in mental health I spent many hours
helping people to set goals – identifying something the person wanted to do in
order to bring about behavioural, cognitive and emotional changes. Of course,
goals had to be ‘SMART’ – that is, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic
and Time-limited. I found the whole detailed process of working with people to
set goals very rewarding because, if you did it well, people often noticed
significant changes in their everyday lives. Not only did I teach service users
and their family members how to set goals, but I also taught mental health
professionals how to teach people how to set goals! And, of course, I used it
in my own life to solve problems and achieve things.
It seems to me that goal-setting is quite an active,
methodical process for helping us to do something whereas setting an
intention is a more spiritual approach, focussing not so much on what we want
to achieve as how we want to be, or how we want our lives to be. This
can almost seem a mystical or magical process – more like making a wish or, as
my daughter sometimes says, “putting something out there in the universe.”
This summer I fulfilled what was practically a lifetime
ambition, to have a campervan. Reflecting on the process of how this came
about, I think it had less to do with goal-setting and more to do with inviting
in an intention. Yes, I did my research and followed some smaller steps (looking
at different vehicles, finding out the pros and cons,) but it didn’t feel
particularly systematic. It was more a case of thinking, “Finally, I think I
could get a campervan. Yes, I could see myself having a campervan.” I stopped
telling myself it was unrealistic, silly, a fantasy, and started telling
myself, “Wouldn’t it be good if I had a campervan?”
My intention became to have a campervan and I now have one. And it’s great having one. I’ve also started another blog (that makes a total of three now, which explains why I don’t write a new post very frequently on any of them!) My new blog is called ‘Travels With My Dulcimer’ and celebrates my love of playing the dulcimer twinned with my love for travelling around in my campervan. It’s very new (I’ve only had the campervan a few months) but, over time, I’m hoping it will become a kind of travelog. And, in a slightly different way to this blog, it’s also about creativity and wellbeing. I hope you enjoy reading all three of my blogs which I think will complement each other with their overlapping interests in creativity, music, writing, travel and wellbeing. You can visit and follow my other blogs by clicking on these links:
Tuesday 28 June 2022
More Stupid Than Ever – On Psychological Transformation, Grief and Trauma
Meanwhile, in the i-weekend newspaper earlier this
month, Patrick Cockburn published an opinion piece called Today’s World
Leaders Seem To Be More Stupid Than Ever. Cockburn suggests that Vladimir
Putin, Boris Johnson, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping all demonstrate, in various
ways, “plain and simple stupidity” – a factor that is often underestimated in
the role it plays in determining the course of history.
Perhaps what makes leaders stupid – if they aren’t already –
is the tendency to surround themselves with people who agree with them and who
won’t (or can’t) give them sensible advice. In this situation, it would be easy
to believe that one is always right about everything and that, therefore, there
is no need for change or personal transformation. But believing that psychological
transformation is neither necessary nor even desirable is the height of
stupidity.
I read the book in the context of what could be called my
own personal trauma – bereavement. Louise writes: “Grief also has an important place
in trauma understandings. Many traumatic events evoke both trauma and grief
reactions. The losses inherent in many traumatic events – of life, world views
and beliefs, a sense of safety, places, roles and routines – can lead to
profound experiences of sadness and yearning and processes of mourning and remembrance.
Despite this, trauma and grief research and theories have tended to remain separate.”
This is absolutely true and is perhaps because, while traumatic
events tend to be viewed as extraordinary occurrences, bereavement and grief are
experienced by all of us as part of the natural life-cycle. Louise provides an inexhaustive
but sobering list of traumatic events: “natural and human-made disasters, war,
forced migration and displacement, forced separations of children from their
parents, abuse and neglect, torture, accidents and injuries, health crises and
private assaults to emotional, physical, social and spiritual well-being.”
In this context, my own personal loss could fall into this
last category as being a “private assault to my emotional, physical, social and
spiritual well-being.” But, as for those people who have experienced “natural
and human-made disasters, war, forced migration and displacement, forced
separations of children from their parents...” there is no shortage of examples
in our daily news bulletins, from the victims of Putin’s war in Ukraine to the
refugees that Johnson wants to forcibly displace to Rwanda. It is, indeed, “plain
and simple stupidity” to add to the trauma of already-traumatised people.
The good news, according to the evidence cited in Louise’s
book, is that most people are able to recover from trauma, whether in
the sense that they experience a remission in symptoms of PTSD, or in the sense
that they return to their normal, pre-traumatic functioning. And some will even
experience post-traumatic growth. I discuss post-traumatic growth in my
book Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental Health Practice, as a process wherein
people exposed to life-threatening situations experience, somewhat unexpectedly, improved psychological
wellbeing.
The underlying message of Understanding Trauma and Resilience
is a hopeful one. As Louise writes, “returning to functioning is the most
common response to potential trauma, and therefore the processes that activate
this return to living, and potentially living and functioning well, need to be understood
better.” In the meantime, whether they know it or not, to undergo some sort
of psychological transformation is exactly what some of our far-from transformational
leaders need.
Monday 11 April 2022
Living on the ceiling
I have managed to write no more than one song and a handful of album reviews since the ceiling first began to fall down. Work on my novel, several short stories, ideas for articles, recordings for my next album and even blog posts has been suspended while, week after week, tradesmen have been running up and down my stairs at unexpected times of the day, turning my electricity on and off as the whim takes them, playing Fleetwood Mac and the Bee Gees at high volume and generating a cloud of dust that covered every surface of the house, only to be renewed the next day after Sisyphean efforts at hoovering and dusting.
Now that the renovations are complete and I can gradually start moving things back to their rightful places (which, in some cases, is the charity shop or the recycling centre) I feel able to concentrate once more. So you can expect more regular blog posts while I play catch-up on the things I’ve been meaning to share with you. But, first, would you mind giving me a hand with some of these boxes?...
Monday 29 November 2021
Nursing literary ambitions
Weekend On Call is an entirely fictional account of a
weekend in the life of a mental health nurse manager. The combination of an
alcohol problem, work-related stress and difficulties in his marriage lead to a
crisis, as he struggles with his own mental health while being expected to oversee
the management of mental health services over the weekend period. In the story,
the on-call manager recalls something he was told back when he first trained as
a mental health nurse:
Back
inside the house, you put the bleep and the on-call mobile on the coffee table
and sit in an armchair, in the
dark. You notice you can’t stop crying. When you did your nurse training all those years ago, you remember someone
saying that to work in mental health you had to be ‘okay in yourself’. What did that mean? That you had
to have good mental health in your own
right? That you had to have a stable home life, a secure relationship, a happy
marriage?
‘The Waves of Change’ is a remarkably apt title from my
point of view. By a strange quirk its publication coincides with my decision
not to renew my registration as a mental health nurse. I retired from the NHS
in 2016 but maintained my professional registration as I then began a second
career as a senior lecturer in mental health nursing. When my late wife became
terminally ill I decided to retire from nurse education, ultimately becoming her
full-time carer. Waves of Change indeed – retirement followed by widowerhood. But
it is only now, as my professional registration comes up for renewal, that I am
finally, officially un-becoming a registered nurse. I began my nurse
training in 1983 so there hasn’t been a time in the past 38 years when I haven’t
considered myself involved in mental health nursing. Relinquishing my nurse registration
could be seen as another major life event and another loss. In one way, I do feel
like I’m surrendering a major part of who I am but I’m considering it an opportunity
to become something else. Now, having retired twice, I feel it’s time to let go
of nursing and to focus more on my other lifelong interests – writing and
music. That’s why it’s so good to have some of my fiction published instead. And
so I begin my third career – this time as a writer and musician. It sounds, somehow, so
much more interesting than ‘retired mental health nurse’.
Wednesday 7 July 2021
King and country – a creative approach to public health in Bhutan
King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck |
It seems, for the past 14 months, the king has been travelling “by foot, car and horse to remote hamlets to oversee measures to warn his tiny kingdom of 700,000 about the coronavirus outbreak that has flared up in neighbouring India.”
Alfred the Great |
King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck’s nationwide, 14-month
mission seems somehow much more benevolent and committed – the sort of thing you
can imagine Alfred the Great might have done for his people, had he not been so
preoccupied with repelling Viking raids.
Be that as it may, Bhutan’s ruler’s creative approach to health
and wellbeing seems to be paying off for king and country – at the time of writing,
the COVID death toll in Bhutan is reported to be just one person, compared with
the UK’s more than 128,000.
Wednesday 7 April 2021
‘Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental Health Practice’ celebrates a milestone in a time of pandemic
I can’t quite believe that it’s now three years since my book Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental Health Practice was first published. Since the spring of 2018 so much has happened in my own life and, of course, in everybody’s lives. I’ve experienced three major life events – retirement, bereavement and grandparenthood – whilst, like everyone else, living through successive lockdowns and months of restrictions on travel, recreation and social contact.
Through these times people have found creativity a solace but also, occasionally, something hard to harness or sustain. It might almost be said our wellbeing has been sacrificed for the sake of our health although, of course, in reality this is a contradiction. In our efforts to avoid contracting and transmitting a physical illness those things that make for physical, psychosocial and spiritual wellbeing have been side-lined. We’ve been denied normal weddings and funerals, trips to the pub and the cinema, companionship, hugs, celebrations. And there is a growing acknowledgment that mental health has been forced to play second fiddle to physical health and that this is surely storing up trouble for us as a society.
When I first hit upon the idea of writing a book about these three elements – creativity, wellbeing, mental health practice – I thought I was being quite original. While all three topics were well-researched in themselves, not many writers or researchers had considered the connections between these three aspects of human life. Even my publishers (and the peer reviewers and series editors) seemed to agree that it was a novel enough idea to merit publication. So, it gives me great satisfaction – though, of course, I can’t take any credit for this trend – to notice a little flurry of international publications in the past six months which deal with some of the same connections.
Firstly, at the end of 2020, the International Journal of Wellbeing devoted a whole issue to the theme of researching creativity and wellbeing. Writing without the awareness that 2021 would continue in a similar vein, the editorial reflected on the impact of pandemic on creativity and wellbeing in the preceding year:“Insofar as creativity involves adaptive behaviour that emerges in response to interruptions to previously successful routines and habits (…) 2020 has been the year of creativity par excellence. But the disruptive impact of COVID-19 has also destroyed or damaged many creative social products generated by those old routines and habits, meaning that routines and habits, and not just interruptions or impasses, can also be pathways to creativity (…). The events of 2020 should therefore give us pause to consider the meaning of the term ‘creativity’ and to reflect on the potential role of creativity in cultivating and supporting wellbeing” (Kiernan, Davidson, & Oades, 2020).
I’m honoured to get a name check
in this editorial, alongside others including the great Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
in the discussion about how creativity research has been brought into domains
such as business, education and manufacturing and how, in turn, this has helped
“to position creativity as an increasingly important concept in the burgeoning
field of wellbeing research” (Kiernan, Davidson, & Oades, 2020).
Next, in the January issue of Frontiers
in Psychology, Elizabeth Wilson (of the Creative Arts and Music Therapy
Research Unit at the University of Melbourne) writes about using art therapy
with creative arts students (Wilson, 2021). Her research study explores ways of meeting the
mental health and wellbeing needs of students through a brief creative arts
therapies approach. She found that single session art therapy was able to
afford students a novel means to externalise problems, leading them to form a
less internalised view of the self. One of Wilson’s research themes is single
session art therapy as a ‘novel experience’, and she also cites my book – and
the work of Steenbarger (2006) – on the subject of novelty:
“Novelty is described in the literature on creative thinking as encompassing any idea, process or product deemed by a perceiver as offering a feeling of ‘departure from the familiar’ (Gillam, 2018). Within the field of brief psychotherapy, novelty is considered to help ‘disorient clients in positive ways’ through the therapist’s strategic use of techniques that help stimulate a sense of play, humour and imagination in the therapy space (Steenbarger, 2006).”
Finally, also in January, a group
of Norwegian researchers published a paper in Medicine Health Care and
Philosophy exploring the use of creative writing among young adults in
treatment for psychosis (Synnes, Romm and Bondevik, 2021). Again, the
authors cite my book, along with the contemporary work of Costa and Abreu (2018):
“Although expressive writing is a clearly defined method that has been researched extensively, creative writing is a much less defined practice, covering various forms of literary writing such as poetry, fiction and storytelling, both in groups and on an individual basis (Costa and Abreu 2018; Gillam 2018). Costa and Abreu (2018) call for greater clarity with a consistent conceptualisation for the application of creative writing in clinical settings; they conclude that at the moment, there are no ‘established ways of assessing qualitatively or quantitatively the therapeutic benefits of creative writing’ (2018, p. 83).”
Although they acknowledge that
research on creative writing in mental illness and psychosis is still in its
infancy, Synnes, Romm and Bondevik conclude that creative writing groups
can be valuable for young adults who have experienced psychosis adding that their
findings correspond with previous research highlighting creative writing as
part of a recovery process (Synnes, Romm and Bondevik, 2021).
So, three years post-publication,
I’m delighted that other researchers continue to explore the links between
creativity and wellbeing as well as the links between creativity and mental
health practice, whether this involves art therapy with creative arts students
or creative writing with young people with psychosis. And, of course, this time
of pandemic and social isolation – and its aftermath – will continue to yield
new insights into the value of creativity and how best to sustain our wellbeing.
References
Costa, A.C. and Abreu, M.V. (2018.) Expressive and creative
writing in the therapeutic context: from the different concepts to the
development of writing therapy programs. Psychologica 61 (1):
69–86.
Gillam, T. (2018). Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental
Health Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kiernan, F., Davidson, J. W., & Oades, L. G. (2020).
Researching creativity and wellbeing: Interdisciplinary perspectives. International
Journal of Wellbeing, 10(5), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v10i5.1523
Steenbarger, B. (2006). “The importance of novelty in
psychotherapy,” in Clinical Strategies for Becoming a Master Psychotherapist,
eds W. O’Donohue, N. A. Cummings, and J. L. Cummings (Cambridge, MA: Academic
Press), 277–290. doi: 10.1016/B978-012088416-2/50017-7
Synnes, O., Romm, K.L. and Bondevik, H. (2021). The
poetics of vulnerability: creative writing among young adults in treatment for
psychosis in light of Ricoeur’s and Kristeva’s philosophy of language and
subjectivity. Jan 2021 · Medicine Health Care and Philosophy.
Wilson, E. (2021). Novel Solutions to Student Problems: A
Phenomenological Exploration of a Single Session Approach to Art Therapy with
Creative Arts University Students. Frontiers in Psychology. 18 January
2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.600214
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