Members of the healthcare community are increasingly turning to alternative and complementary therapies to reduce patients’ symptoms, improve quality of life, and boost their ability to cope with stress. The Beckstrand Art Therapy Program operating at Miller Children's Hospital Mattel Children's Hospital at UCLA uses art and psychoanalysis to teach children and teens with cancer how to better cope with their diagnosis and prognosis, and to aid in their recovery.

Led by Art Therapist Carrie Cottone, the program utilizes the creative, psychotherapeutic process of art-making to ameliorate physical and emotional pain and foster psychological growth in kids undergoing cancer treatment. This process helps both patients and families to better cope with the illness by:

• • Fostering hope and psychological well-being through artistic change and peer interaction
• • Offering a creative avenue to communicate physical and emotional needs
• • Increasing self esteem and reducing pain and symptoms through mastery of art materials and pictorial expression
• • Exploring complicated, frightening thoughts and feelings related to cancer and its difficult treatments
• • Moving from the feeling of isolation to the sense of connection and from the frustration of powerlessness to the satisfaction of a sense of control

In the Art Therapy Program, children learn to use brightly colored crayons, chalk, paint brushes, paper and clay as powerful healing tools in professionally-led activities because studies show that children who participate in art therapy from the first hospitalization demonstrate collaborative behavior toward procedures such as lumbar punctures and bone marrow aspirations. A wide range of tools and techniques are used to encourage children to relax, communicate and share their experiences in non-threatening ways.

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