Healing Mental Health Through the Arts – Women’s eNews
In the aftermath of grant cuts from the National Endowment of Arts (NEA) and its consequent trickle down to other arts organizations along with more recent cuts to Medicaid coverage there is more reason than ever to support and endorse the arts for mental health treatment.
Utilizing arts modalities like writing, music, storytelling and visual arts recently are on the rise in mental health yet it is not a new phenomenon. Dr. Thema Bryant, Director of the Cultural and Trauma Research Laboratory at Pepperdine University, Minister, Sacred Artist and author of the upcoming book, Matters of the Heart, says that from the Black communities in Baltimore to Liberia, Indigenous ways have lingered. “There wasn’t a separation from spirituality in your day-to-day life…It wasn’t something you just do Sunday morning and then put on a shelf,” she says.
Dr. Bryant, who served as the President of the American Psychological Association (2023), also says that there was a cultural understanding and immersion in healing and through the arts. For example, she says that she was an assault survivor during her college years and that her previous connection with arts, wellness and healing helped her through it. “And I did get therapy,” she adds. “I went to the counseling center on campus and in addition to that I danced and prayed and journaled and all of those things.”
“One of the ways I explained my journey is that some people who experience violation end up hating their bodies. And the reason I don’t think that happened to me is because I had a relationship with my body before the violation. And my relationship with my body was dancing. So, I didn’t experience myself as an object of other people’s actions. I had some sense of agency or empowerment. Before I talked about it verbally, I had already danced about it,” she continues. “You don’t wait to engage in these arts until something terrible happens. It is a part of Life, a part of community and a part of rites of passage.”
Arts as rites of passage depicts a transformational program that Nafeesah Goldsmith, Reiki Master Practitioner, Community Outreach Specialist, Founder and CEO of NAFEESAH A. Goldsmith LLC, participated in. Called the Ritual 4 Return (R4R), a semester-long process that forms as its centerpiece a rite of passage for citizens who have been incarcerated to change their narrative through the arts, according to Kevin Bott, Ph.D., Founder. The arts modalities used in the program include dialogue, writing, theatre, movement, storytelling and mask making, he says.
Goldsmith, who was a recent cohort graduate on May 4, 2025 at New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) says that she participated in the program because she felt like it was a necessary step approaching the 10-year anniversary of her release. NJPAC Arts & Well-Being is the producing partner for R4R, making it available for participants. “I envisioned a space that honored both our shared journeys and individual transformations,” she adds.
Bott says that childhood trauma has been experienced by 98% of people who serve jail time. “Shame is highly correlated with trauma, and is exacerbated by the experience of entering prison, by incarceration itself, and by post-release policies that impede the resumption of normal life in the community,” he says. Trauma and shame fuel low self-esteem, hopelessness, despair, self-loathing, suicidal ideation, self-isolation, increased impulsivity and aggression, difficulty maintaining relationships, problems making decisions, and feelings of not belonging in social settings,” he continues. “Therefore, we work to untangle the knots of trauma that live in our bodies with physical work that reconnects the lost connections between body, memory and language. Since trauma imposes a disintegrated sense of self, this form of reintegration is used,” he adds.
The program has received the 2024 Stanley N. Katz Prize for Excellence in Public Humanities and has received funding from such sources as Michelle Alexander’s foundation (author of The New Jim Crow), New Jersey Council for the Humanities, Columbia University’s Justice Lab, and New York Humanities. By participating in the R4R, Goldsmith says she experienced “a sacred release. A moment of letting go, bearing witness, and being witnessed.” “It was about reaffirming what has always been within me: my presence, my power, my divine knowing,” Goldsmith adds.
Stacie Yeldell, Music Psychotherapist, Senior Adjunct Lecturer at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), believes the arts are intricately connected to who we are, and they provide an avenue to improve wellness and heal. “We are creator beings,” Yeldell says, “We are connecting to a part of ourselves that is beyond the mind. It’s beyond the body,” she adds. Yeldell entered this work from an artist’s perspective, looking to “heal specifically from the music business,” and auditioned for the Masters Music Therapy Program at New York University, where she trained. “And that meant this very mystical tree into the beautiful world of music therapy, becoming a music therapist,” Yeldell adds. She explains that with the arts we have an ability to reconnect with the inner child and make ourselves whole again by working with the arts as a “play” process that connects the inner child.
She points out that creative therapists wouldn’t be needed if we still operated in an Indigenous way,” Yeldell says. “We need creative arts therapists as these kinds of modern-day shamans, to remind people to be creative as a way to heal themselves, because that’s not a part of our medical system, right?” Thankfully it’s moving in that direction. NJPAC houses one of 23 social prescribing programs arising in the U.S. reported on in The Lancet
Aly Maier Lokuta, Assistant VP, Arts & Well-Being, NJPAC says the ArtsRx program, their social prescribing program, distributes six arts activities over six months that participants choose from agencies of choice, not only NJPAC, but other arts organizations in the community. Participants can bring two guests to combat the intimidation factor and loneliness, she says.
Lokuta adds that they never pay for activities. The “prescriptions” are made through various referral organizations including Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, Rutgers University-Newark, Newark Department of Health, Returning Citizens Support Group, RWJBarnabas Health Clinic at Eastside High. Like Dr. Bryant, Lokuta also believes that arts and health are rooted in ancient practice. “Before we had language, we sang; before we had written word, before we had the bio-medical model, the arts have always been a part of our integral healing process,” she says.
Yeldell believes if we remember our creative essence as a tool for healing, we can heal not just ourselves but our communities through that connection. As Dr. Bryant reminds us, “There is a sacredness to it.”
About the Author: Jacquese Armstrong is a fellow with The Loreen Arbus Accessibility is Fundamental Program, a fellowship created with Women’s eNews to train women with disabilities as professional journalists so that they may write, research and report on the most crucial issues impacting the disabilities community.
