School
of Creative
Industries
Jolene Chiang Shu Wen
Jolene is a passionate registered art psychotherapist. She specialises in grief and loss, trauma and mental health. Her clientele includes young children to seniors experiencing different types of losses. She integrates mindfulness, somatic awareness and narrative approaches to support bereaved persons in meaning-making and restoration. She provides individual art therapy and designs group art therapy sessions to compassionately address the unique biopsychosocial and spiritual needs of each person she meets. She is an invited conference speaker at the upcoming Grief & Bereavement Conference 2021.
Work
memoria
Mixed media
150 x 80 cm
2020
Thesis abstract
Mentalisation in museum-based group art therapy for youths living with mental health conditions
Museum-based group art therapy is an emerging topic for art therapists in community-based practices. This study examines museum-based group art therapy for youths living with mental health conditions through the psychotherapeutic lens of mentalisation in the context of attachment theory. Mentalisation is defined as the capacity to understand and recognise others in terms of inner mental states such as desires, needs, feelings, beliefs and goals (Allen, 2013; Fonagy & Bateman, 2004; Fonagy et al, 2017; Fonagy & Campbell, 2016). The capacity to mentalise supports functions in self-organisation and affect regulation which develops from early secure attachment relationships (Fonagy & Campbell, 2016). This qualitative case series study was based on three museum-based group art therapy workshops for youths living with mental health conditions in a community-based agency. Adopting an action-research and self-reflexive research framework, the following therapeutic factors were discussed in terms of how they support mentalising processes. First, the role of museum space as a transitional space; interaction with museum artwork/exhibits as a projection tool to explore one’s symbolic self, the therapeutic stance of an art therapist trainee and group processes were given closer analysis.