Mental Health
During this project, we learned about mental illnesses and how to treat them using art therapy. One part of the project was reading a book called All the Bright Places about a boy with bipolar disorder. We also paired up in groups and choose a mental illness from a pre-selected list (my partnership choose night terrors). We had to research the disorder and write up a case report with facts and statistics. After we were finished with the case report, we wrote creative writing pieces about the disorder we had chosen (this was done independently of our partner). I wrote my story about a cargo captain who begins suffering from night terrors after he allows a civilian on his ship. For the art therapy portion of the project we got to meet several art therapists and make our own art therapy session to help people with the disorder we studied. From my research it seemed that night terrors tended to be caused by stress or bad sleep cycles, so my partnership created a meditative artwork session. By picking soothing colors and drawing in repetitive, simple patterns, we thought we could calm people down and help them get to sleep. The idea was that it would have the same affect as counting sheep, except you have a cool art piece to show at the end of it.
As far as what we learned about night terrors, we found that they are similar to nightmares except that they occur in a different stage of sleep. A simple explanation is this: there are 4 stages of sleep, NREM1, NREM2, NREM3, and REM. The majority of dreams occur in the REM stage, and when one of these dreams is distressful it's called a nightmare. It is rare, but possible, for a dream to occur in another stage of sleep (most commonly NREM3) and when this dream is distressful it is called a night terror. Most of the strange things associated with night terrors occur because of the differences between NREM3 and REM sleep. To name a few: NREM3 is a much deeper sleep than REM, so people will rarely ever wake up from a night terror; During REM sleep large muscles are paralyzed (to prevent people acting out their dreams), this doesn't happen in NREM3, so people suffering from night terrors will flail about violently and often sleepwalk; finally, the brain tries to remember things during REM, but not NREM3, so most people who have night terrors won't remember that they have any problem.
For exhibition, the plan was for our class to become a sort on mini-clinic. We created ID cards for the characters in our stories who had disorders. In my case that meant making a card for Earnest Donahue (the cargo captain I mentioned earlier). People who visited the exhibition would receive the ID card and a copy of our story, as well as a couple possible disorders the person might have. Each disorder had a booth where students would tell the audience members about the disorder and preform some art therapy. The audience member's goal during the exhibition would be to visit the relevant booths and try to figure out what disorder their person had. They would then revive the corresponding case report for that disorder. The Night Terrors booth was right next to the enterence of the exhibition, so we received a lot of people who didn't know what they were supposed to do. This meant we got a lot of visitors, but no one who's person had night terrors. This was alright by us, we just gave them the same presentation we would've given people with the proper IDs, and everything worked out.
In order to draw people to our booth and to show them an example of the meditative artwork we wanted, we made the large art piece shown below.
As far as what we learned about night terrors, we found that they are similar to nightmares except that they occur in a different stage of sleep. A simple explanation is this: there are 4 stages of sleep, NREM1, NREM2, NREM3, and REM. The majority of dreams occur in the REM stage, and when one of these dreams is distressful it's called a nightmare. It is rare, but possible, for a dream to occur in another stage of sleep (most commonly NREM3) and when this dream is distressful it is called a night terror. Most of the strange things associated with night terrors occur because of the differences between NREM3 and REM sleep. To name a few: NREM3 is a much deeper sleep than REM, so people will rarely ever wake up from a night terror; During REM sleep large muscles are paralyzed (to prevent people acting out their dreams), this doesn't happen in NREM3, so people suffering from night terrors will flail about violently and often sleepwalk; finally, the brain tries to remember things during REM, but not NREM3, so most people who have night terrors won't remember that they have any problem.
For exhibition, the plan was for our class to become a sort on mini-clinic. We created ID cards for the characters in our stories who had disorders. In my case that meant making a card for Earnest Donahue (the cargo captain I mentioned earlier). People who visited the exhibition would receive the ID card and a copy of our story, as well as a couple possible disorders the person might have. Each disorder had a booth where students would tell the audience members about the disorder and preform some art therapy. The audience member's goal during the exhibition would be to visit the relevant booths and try to figure out what disorder their person had. They would then revive the corresponding case report for that disorder. The Night Terrors booth was right next to the enterence of the exhibition, so we received a lot of people who didn't know what they were supposed to do. This meant we got a lot of visitors, but no one who's person had night terrors. This was alright by us, we just gave them the same presentation we would've given people with the proper IDs, and everything worked out.
In order to draw people to our booth and to show them an example of the meditative artwork we wanted, we made the large art piece shown below.