Books like Arts & Dementia

Pat Allen demonstrates how art interpretation involves reflection on her creations in an ongoing process of responding creatively to their expression, as contrasted with explanation, analysis, and uncovering hidden ‘meaning.’ As authors say, writing helps them understand what they think, and thought keeps moving like a stream.  

I am often asked whether art-based research can present the art alone without commentary. Documentary films do this in their combination of film footage and narration, but with painting, dance, music, and other art forms, expository reflection suggests how the personal expression furthers understanding and usefulness to others.

Pat Allen models this process by integrating her written responses to visual images into a convincing work of art that I see as presenting artistic inquiry as a new art genre.

Karen Gallas introduced me in the early 1970s to the integration of various forms of artistic expression in the education of young children, based on the work of Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Elwyn Richardson in New Zealand and the British Infant School movement, which inspired experimental education in the United States. 

Languages of Learning grew from Gallas’s classroom research exploring how artistic thinking enabled children with various language, cultural, and learning differences to participate fully in the learning process that she presented as “arts as epistemology” in a symposium with Maxine Greene and others published in the Harvard Educational Review. These foundations in childhood continuously inform artistic inquiry in all of life.

Jung’s Red Book (Liber Novus) is a masterpiece of art-based research.

Although he called his creations ‘nature,’ not ‘art,’ I describe art as a force of nature. In addition to saving his soul during a period of personal crisis, the ‘self-experiment’ perfected the methods, establishing him as a world-renowned figure and arguably the most sustained influence on psychotherapeutic practice to date. His firsthand experimentation exemplifies how personal artistic inquiry can transcend itself to be of use to others.

Where Jung’s heirs kept the manuscript in a vault for almost fifty years after his death, possibly concerned that the intimate expressions might jeopardize his “scientific“ image, the resoundingly positive response to it will set an important precedent for future art-based research. 

Ross Prior is the creator of a world community committed to advancing the practice of art-based research that has grown from his founding of the Journal of Applied Arts & Health.

A primary goal of the journal, and this collection written by contributors to it, is Prior’s effort to build confidence in artistic practice as research that generates “authentic artistic knowledge” and helps artists deepen their insights into “what they do.” 

In response to the current demand for evidence-based research, he consistently asks—how is the evidence defined? Isn’t the outcome of artistic inquiry the art itself, with social impact determined by its rigor, quality, and persuasiveness? Can we confidently make the case for art’s inclusion in research furthering learning, human understanding, public health, and global well-being?

This book touched my heart with its true story of a father helping his son overcome autism through horseback riding.

Horses are excellent therapy animals for many neurological reasons, and this book helps to explain why.

Art Janov's book, The Primal Scream and its follow-up Primal Therapy, provided a means of breaking down the walls of this mental prison, by expressing the sheer sense of helplessness you feel when the world is presented to you as a screaming baby. In my case this was the stunned silence that I later learned was autism and the little professor syndrome, which meant keeping your eyes open and your mouth shut, in order to understand the strange interplay I saw expressed before me. Meaningless shouting and screaming at the frustration of what I faced was a new experience for me.

Forced electroshock or “electroconvulsive therapy” (ECT) is still commonplace, and it caused Linda Andre massive memory loss—but she recovered enough to write one of my favorite of many important books by people who’ve personally experienced forced treatment.

Her commentaries on the science are good, but Andre, once a leading activist, was frequently interviewed by news media and attacked by pro-ECT psychiatrists, and she exposes the behind-the-scenes politics and public relations of psychiatric science, forced treatment, and ECT in fascinating ways.

Her observations on how journalists tend to work, and of the many ways even “responsible” news outlets can misrepresent, manipulate, and get manipulated, are unnerving.

With revealing irony, Doctors of Deception criticized pro-ECT psychiatrists for rarely disclosing their conflicts of interest—and the book was viciously attacked in a prominent review by two pro-ECT psychiatrists who didn’t disclose to readers that they themselves were criticized in the book. 

After years of being misdiagnosed and wrongly medicated, and after years of living in denial about my bipolar disorder, I began Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT) in 2017. And it saved my life. Linehan has created an evidence-based treatment program that has taught me mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotional regulation, and distress tolerance. Frankly speaking, I think DBT should be taught in elementary and high schools.

As a young psychologist during the Vietnam War, Edward Tick served his country not by enlisting himself but through tireless efforts to help those who returned from war traumatized. This was the first book that helped me understand that posttraumatic stress is not just some “disorder” that I’d suffer from forever. Rather, it is simply the human mind’s normal—probably unavoidable—response to combat, and, Tick argues, there is also such a thing as posttraumatic growth. He examines how ancient and modern societies train their warrior classes, noting that the ritualistic civilian-to-soldier process (we’d call it “boot camp” or “basic training”) often lacks a necessary counterpart today: that is, a formal soldier-to-civilian process, and this only compounds the issues of PTSD and the American military-civilian divide.

What touched me most about this book is the understanding that our experiences shape us differently depending on when they happen in our lives. Wounds that occur at different ages can create very different patterns in how we think, react, and move through the world.

The book also invites a deeper level of compassion—not only for ourselves, but for others. Instead of asking, "What's wrong with you?" it encourages us to ask, "What happened to you?" That simple shift can completely change how we view another person's behavior and reminds us that everyone is carrying a story we may not see.