Community Questions

1.Describe your community. You may be a part of many communities: church, school, neighborhood, youth groups, town, or social organizations. Describe the community to which you are closest.

    The community in which I am closest is my work community. I work at a children’s psychiatric acute hospital and residential treatment facility. I work in the acute hospital. The nature of our work is personal to all of us so my coworkers and I operate differently than at other places of business. We develop working relationships and also personal friendships. Our community is also made up of the patients we treat and their families.


2. What are the shared experiences and events in your community?

    We go through a lot at work. We deal with children who are in crisis and acting violently to others or themselves. We often work closely with one another and need to trust that each of us are doing our part to keep everyone when dealing with children during violent outbursts. We frequently have to restrain children. Our work is emotionally taxing as well as physically taxing. We are interacting with children who have little control over their emotions. One way we process is meeting up outside of work for drinks or to celebrate someone’s birthday. This way we are able to interact without discussing work or our jobs. Our place of employment is also a nonprofit organization so we often have fundraisers.

3. What common goals do you and the people in the community share?

    Our main goal is to help the children in our facility work through their emotional problems and reduce their acuity so they can safely return home and back to their typical lives. We work together to develop therapeutic groups and projects designed to help children express their feelings and needs. We also work together to maintain the safety of the children while they are in the hospital.

4. What stories in your community need to be told?

    The most important story that our community needs to tell is that mental illness is not something to be ashamed of or hide it from society. Mental illness can affect anyone.

5. How might individual, group, and community stories be told through art work?

    I love artwork from individuals in communities that is unique and reflects individual personalities. One of the ways that we tell the stories from clients in our hospital is allowing them to express themselves through art. Our clients are able to tell the stories of what has happened to them or find a way to express feelings they may not be able to identify. Drawings, paintings and collages are the most common methods of expression.

6. Is there a sign, symbol, ritual, or story from these questions that could act as a central metaphor?

    One of the most common ways we tell stories in this community is through the use of flowers. We create flowers to symbolize growth and new beginnings. The children who come into our facility do a lot of really difficult work and flowers seem to capture that commitment for positive change.

7. Are there opportunities for you to support and expand upon local craft traditions?

    Locally, there are a lot of artists who use paper crafting. During a recent visit to an art fair we saw many types of paper crafts like collages, folded paper, paint on paper, ink on paper, and decoupage.

8. Discuss the idea that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” What aspects of the community environment do some members of the group find beautiful that others do not?  Can those who find something ugly see it in another way?
   
    My community at work is unique. Some of us find the children and their actions more beautiful than others. When a child is cursing you and hitting you it is difficult to find any beauty but a lot of us at work understand that this is the only way the child knows how to express themselves. They are repeating actions they have seen or they are telling you what they need the only way they know how. That is the beauty I see. I think others will see it too if they try to understand that most of these negative behaviors are a direct result of trauma.

9. Who could you partner with for this project?

    We could partner with local schools for this project. Because my work community is part of our larger community the children at local schools are the children we end up treating a lot of the time. School children would be ideal to help us create a floral display with positive messages for their peers who are in crisis.

 10. Where could this event take place or be displayed?

    The public library is a central hub of our area. Many, many families and individuals visit the library each day. Our library has an area dedicated specifically to artwork showings and events such as these.

11. Who would you like to reach in this project?  Who would you like to see or be educated  by this project?

    Ideally, this project should reach everyone in our area to help them understand that mental illness can affect anyone and children we often label as “bad” or otherwise undesirable are suffering with some trauma that we likely do not understand. Often when I tell someone where I work the individual groans, “Oh, you work with the bad kids!” when the opposite is true. The kids we treat are reacting to trauma rather than just acting out for no reason.

Beauty and Repulsion

This is Laurie