The play cure: In a clinical setting, playful activities are not distractions; they take patients deep into trauma – and out the other side...

‘Take a pen. Place it on the paper. Draw wherever you want. However you want. You know, Paul Klee said: “Drawing is like taking a line for a walk.”’ In the hospital workshop, I turn towards a patient, smile and continue: ‘So, let’s draw together. We could draw houses, and draw a path between our homes. Let’s grab paints. Turn the paper around. Upside down. If you don’t mind, I can paint your sky and you can paint mine… We can play and make…’

‘For more than 20 years, I’ve been saying these sentences, playing and making, as a clinical arts therapist, specialising in mental health, and as a lecturer and consultant using creative techniques with doctors, hospital directors, nursing managers and entrepreneurs. Guided by artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Jackson Pollock, and by Plato, I spend my days tapping into what the phenomenologist and philosopher of play Eugen Fink calls the ‘peach skin of things’. It glows.’

Two paragraphs that may interest you to read the whole story

• ‘Play, as Fink writes, unites ‘the highest desire and the deepest suffering’. For years, I worked with teenagers diagnosed with psychosis. A highlight of our work was a short surrealist play, ‘The Lost Potato Masher’, which they devised based around kitchen objects. The main roles were taken by a fridge, a cupboard, a toaster, a cooker, a table and chairs, and the lost potato masher. The text dealt with parental abandonment, despair, solitude, violence, fate and hope. In a training context, a hospital manager, in an improvisation, once acted the role of the file of a dead patient that had been thrown into a bin. Both of these examples show the cathartic effect of play, allowing us to sit with our shadows...
• ‘A recent study by the psychologists Maja Stanko-Kaczmarek and Lukasz Kaczmarek at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland found that the tactile sensations of finger-painting provoked a state of mindfulness connected with wellbeing. As we paint, we’re present in the moment, and we have a broader attention. This can be contrasted with the ‘mindlessness’ state, often a symptom of mental illness, characterised by past or future ruminations. The physical nature of play and making locates us in the here and now: it centres us in ourselves, mobilising an embodied cognition that’s important in skill learning. At all stages of life, Lego-making, knitting, embroidery and painting can contribute to psychological wellbeing.’

Read here (Aeon, Feb 4, 2021)

Zoom and gloom: How empathy and creativity can re-humanise video conferencing

‘Sitting in a videoconference is a uniformly crap experience. Instead of corroding our humanity, let’s design tools to enhance it...

‘Looking back on my experience of videoconferencing, I still get an odd emotional pain. The feeling is a kind of shame. Not so much for my own wooden performance and the failure of the technology. But rather a feeling that we have all lost a bit of our humanity through it. My interest in these technologies is ethically motivated. I am not at all happy with the banal dehumanisation that results from bad videoconferencing experiences. If, for example, students and teachers can’t express their humanity in education, through its technologies, then we’re just not doing it right.

‘However, I’d like to think that this exploration of videoconferencing in contrast with other more humane experiences has provided some hope and indications of the way to go... That’s how designing works: incremental improvements based on insights drawn from experience. Let’s be optimistic, and keep designing to humanise tech, and using tech to learn about being better humans.’

Read here (Aeon, Dec 1, 2020)

‘Lean into loneliness like it is holding you’ – A poetic reflection on life in lockdown

‘The audiovisual poem How to Be Alone (2010) was a viral hit for the Canadian musician and poet Tanya Davis and the Canadian filmmaker Andrea Dorfman. Their sequel How to Be at Home updates the original for our age of COVID-19 lockdown, pairing Dorfman’s charming animations – a distinctive melding of stop-motion and illustration – with Davis’s lyrical musings on the isolation that she and much of the rest of the world has endured over the past eight months. The resulting short is an artful – and, depending on your current degree of solitude, perhaps cathartic – meditation on the many conflicting emotions inspired by being forced to spend time at home during a crisis.’

View here (Aeon, Nov 12, 2020)

The wisdom of pandemics

‘Viruses are active agents, existing within rich lifeworlds. A safe future depends on understanding this evolutionary story...

‘Researchers since then have uncovered evidence that pathogens exert ‘the strongest selective pressure to drive the evolution of modern humans’. Among the drivers, look to evidence that prehistoric pandemics played a role in selecting for ancestral traits and behaviours that we recognise as human today. Scientists following another thread in this evolutionary narrative describe viral nucleic acids insinuating themselves into our genetic codes. The biologist David Enard at Stanford University in California and colleagues have concluded that ‘viruses are one of the most dominant drivers of evolutionary change across mammalian and human proteomes’...

‘As we become more deft at exploring the nested, dynamically complex relationships among viruses, bacteria, fungi and ourselves, we’ll come closer to grasping how pandemics emerge from a rupturing and rearranging of these relationships. From this deep linking of Aion with Chronos, we can already see the outlines of the wisdom that pandemics offer us. What we’re beginning to faintly understand is this: if we wish to survive as a species, we must gather all of our knowledge from multiple perspectives – however fragmented and partial – and actively engage in conversations with the world we inhabit and that gives us life. Only then will we begin to understand ourselves, and live up to our name, the wise ones, Homo sapiens sapiens.’

Read here (Aeon, Nov 3, 2020)

In a pandemic we learn again what Sartre meant by being free

‘The pandemic also teaches us about freedom in ways that go beyond Sartre’s discussion of the individual. Politically, using Isaiah Berlin’s distinction, we talk of the ‘negative liberty’ to go about our business without restraint, and the ‘positive liberty’ to do the things that give us the possibility to flourish and maximise our potential. For example, a society where there is no compulsory schooling gives parents the negative liberty to educate their children as they wish. But, generally speaking, this doesn’t give the child the positive liberty to have a decent education.

‘Over recent decades in the West, negative liberty has been in the ascendancy and positive liberty has been tarred with the brush of the nanny state. What we should have learned in 2020 is that without health services, effective regulation and sometimes strict rules, our negative freedom is useless and even sometimes destructive. Without state ‘interference’, many more lives would have been lost, jobs destroyed and businesses ruined. We now have an opportunity to reset the balance between negative and positive liberty...’

Read here (Psyche, Sept 30, 2020)

In a pandemic we learn again what Sartre meant by being free

‘One of the most powerful effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, after its terrible toll on human life, has been on our liberty. Around the world, people’s movements have been severely curtailed, tracked and monitored. This has had an impact on our abilities to earn a living, study and even be with loved ones at the end of their lives. Freedom, it seems, is one of this virus’s biggest casualties.

‘But an article by Jean-Paul Sartre for The Atlantic in 1944 makes me question whether this is a straightforward tale of loss. The French philosopher summed up his thesis in the line: ‘Never were we freer than under the German occupation.’ Sartre’s core insight was that it is only when we are physically stopped from acting that we fully realise the true extent and nature of our freedom. If he is right, then the pandemic is an opportunity to relearn what it means to be free.

‘Of course, our situation is not nearly as extreme as it was for the French under occupation, who, as Sartre said, ‘had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk’. Still, like most of us, I have at times found myself unable to do almost everything I had taken for granted. During the strictest lockdown period, nights out at theatres, concert halls and cinemas were cancelled. I couldn’t go for a walk in the countryside, relax in a bar or restaurant, sit on a park bench, visit anyone, even leave my home more than once a day.’

Read here (Aeon, Sept 30, 2020)

Stealth infections

‘From the Black Death to polio, the most dangerous pathogens have moved silently, transmitted by apparently healthy people...

‘It isn’t ‘pandemics’ per se that we need to fear. The concept of being ‘overdue for a pandemic’ actually makes little sense. Pandemics aren’t cyclical, nor are they necessary products of global warming. We are vulnerable to pandemic outbreaks because of our interconnected world, not because there is some mysterious mechanism in the world that’s going to produce them. It takes precise conditions, what we can call ‘disease factories’, to produce pandemics, and these conditions don’t exist until we create them. The 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic was the product of a disease factory: it most likely sprang out of a giant pig farm in the Mexican state of Veracruz, owned in part by Smithfield Foods, a giant US pig-raising and meat-packing conglomerate.’

Read here (Aeon, June 30, 2020)

The new astrology: By fetishising mathematical models, economists turned economics into a highly paid pseudoscience

‘Nonetheless, surveys indicate that economists see their discipline as ‘the most scientific of the social sciences’. What is the basis of this collective faith, shared by universities, presidents and billionaires? Shouldn’t successful and powerful people be the first to spot the exaggerated worth of a discipline, and the least likely to pay for it?

‘In the hypothetical worlds of rational markets, where much of economic theory is set, perhaps. But real-world history tells a different story, of mathematical models masquerading as science and a public eager to buy them, mistaking elegant equations for empirical accuracy.’

[Note: This is an old article published April 4, 2016. We should read this in the context of the epidemiological modelling being used now to forecast Covid-19.]

Read here (Aeon, April 4, 2016)