How art therapy could help your COVID-19 blues

The sense of isolation during the pandemic was compounded this spring for Tania Santer when she moved more than a thousand kilometres away from her home in Toronto to a small town in northwestern Ontario.

The art therapist says she used her own creativity to cope with her loneliness  — and you can too, even if you don't think of yourself as a creative type.

"I think a lot of people throughout the pandemic are learning the benefits of being with ourselves, to ask ourselves: 'how am I feeling?'" and make something from it," says Santer.

Painting became a vital outlet for Santer as she adjusted to her new life as an art therapist with the Sioux Lookout First Nations Health Authority, far away from friends and family and familiar ground in Toronto.

"I use my artwork as a way to take a break or escape into a world that I've created," she says. "It becomes a tangible piece of my inner self.

"When I got into that mode of creative art making, I didn't feel so isolated," she says. 

For beginners, Santer suggests gathering some old magazines to make a collage. You could select a theme based on colour or the types of images that appeal to you and ask yourself why you're drawn to them.

The key to allowing art to help you feel better is to silence your inner critic and approach a creative project with a sense of curiosity and possibility, she says.

"There are no rules to art making."

In its formal practice, art therapy combines psychotherapy and art making to help people express and process difficult emotions.

For example, someone dealing with grief might be asked to use colours or shapes to show what their grief looks like, Santer says, or to consider if grief had a voice what it might say and how it would sound.

"Art is another way to communicate," Santer says. "It opens up different thought processes. We fall into patterns of speaking so it can be really helpful to have a dialogue with images, especially if you're feeling stuck."