Local Ukrainian artist paints tank with symbol of transformation

Source: Benjamin Swatez/Used with permission

“Today we are painting our future. Our children are not afraid of the Russian bullets at this moment. (They are) changing bullet holes into art,” a Ukrainian woman said.

Benjamin Swatez is an international muralist, expressive arts therapist, and co-founder of The Goodness Tour, a non-profit organization offering psychosocial support through creative and expressive arts to communities enduring war, natural disasters, and humanitarian violations. He drove into the war-torn areas of Ukraine with his paint and brushes.

“Why did I choose to enter a war zone?” he asked. “Because every human deserves the basic right to live, play, and express themselves.”

Most relief agencies are called in during crises to provide water, food, and shelter. The psychosocial support needs are often secondary if offered at all. Yet while living in war zones, the trauma reactions are constant, chronic, and all-consuming. War survivors live in a hyper-aroused state of fear and panic, not knowing when bombs or enemy raids will land in their villages.

Source: Benjamin Swatez/Used with permission

During World War I, the term used to describe the “signature injury of war” was “shell-shocked.” This syndrome describes a soldier’s reaction to the intensity of war, resulting in panic, helplessness, and difficulties with reasoning, sleep, and eating. This was a precursor to the PTSD that followed a soldier’s return home.

I interviewed Benjamin Swatez about his experiences while working with “shell-shocked” survivors in Ukraine. Mr. Swatez’s doctoral research for the European Graduate School of Expressive Arts in Switzerland is focused on the effects of implementing an expressive arts therapy curriculum in first responder settings. His courage and commitment to sharing the creative arts within war and disaster zones are fueled by his belief in the healing power of artistic expression.

CL: What is your background, and how did you come into this work?

BS: We all have a personal relationship with trauma in one form or another. Art has been an empowering vehicle that continually inspires me to reframe traumatic events that would have otherwise been psychologically debilitating. While enduring my traumatic times of surviving violence and living on the streets, art was my healer.

My international career includes exhibiting peace-building art in museums on four continents and painting large-scale murals with struggling communities in more than forty countries. I enter the front lines of a crisis and initiate art as a connecting and empowering medium. My aim is to have psychosocial support acknowledged and endorsed as an essential need for first-response teams worldwide.

CL: How do creative arts help in a crisis?

BS: Creativity is within us all. It can be oppressed by severe trauma but never extinguished. It is an honor to assist individuals to reawaken their imagination in the face of adversity. I have witnessed how community art projects help build empathy, resilience, and open dialogue.

My work is not a form of escapism. I introduce tools to temporarily step outside of the high-stress psychological condition. In doing so, some villagers could bypass the fight, flight, or freeze responses. Afterward, they were able to reframe their experience with a new outlook toward solutions.

Each day, I witnessed hope expand through creativity. A local artist painted a butterfly on a rusted Russian tank without prompting. I am always struck by how we, as humans, intuitively know how artistic expression can help alchemize our pain. Sometimes, we need the invitation and encouragement.

CL: How is your work received by those in crisis?

BS: With eight gallons of paint, I arrived at 3:50 a.m. in the village of Moshchun on the outskirts of Kyiv, where over 70 percent of the structures were leveled to the ground. I had to carefully avoid hundreds of landmines surrounding the town. Those who did not evacuate prior to the first wave of attacks experienced the unthinkable. I met one mother who watched her son bombed as he was trying to rescue others.

I slept a few hours each night in a desecrated community building while engaging and creating with those remaining. Living with the people, among the rubble established a deep, essential, and enduring trust.

When I first arrived, I saw many glassed-over eyes and frozen emotional states. Within a few days, I saw eyes that emitted inspiration and resilience, even while bomb sirens were blaring. That is the power of creative arts therapy.

One day, I met a 10-year-old girl who had, on her own accord, painted flower petals around bullet holes on a metal fence. “I’m fixing the fence,” she told her parents. We invited all children to join this transformative mission in the city center.

Village children transforming bullet holes into flowers

Source: Benjamin Swatez/Used with permission

For a three-story community mural, the people asked me to help them paint a stork. “Why a stork?” I asked.

“Because the stork is our symbol of resilience. The stork overcomes all obstacles to always find its way home, and we pray our loved ones find their way home.”

In Lviv, I conducted daily empowering art workshops. We used debris and organic materials to create sculptures; we shared stories, sang, and painted community murals. For these compositions, my approach is not to impose premeditated symbolism. Instead, I invite the community to choose the images and messages relevant to their culture and experiences.

“I am so happy that I’m going to cry. This is the first time I have creatively expressed my voice since the war started,” a young Ukrainian woman said.

Conclusion

The stork mural was broadcast on the official Ukrainian military telegram and spread across the country as a beacon of hope.

Resilience and Return Home Mural, Moshchun, Ukraine

Source: Benjamin Swatez/Used with permission

Mr. Swatez expressed his gratitude to the courageous Ukrainians and all those who bravely offer psychosocial support services to those in need. He is planning to return to Ukraine and continue this healing work.

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Mind-body therapies have been shown — and are recommended in guidelines — to decrease symptoms of anxiety and depression in patients with cancer who may be at any part of the care continuum, an expert said.

With this whole-person system of care, patients can use techniques including mindfulness-based stress reduction, cognitive therapy, meditation and others to address depression and anxiety symptoms. Now that mindfulness-based interventions are now recommended in a guideline prepared by the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) and American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) as a way to treat anxiety and depression during cancer treatment, this may allow more cancer centers to offer this as part of their multidisciplinary care.

CURE® spoke with Linda E. Carlson, Enbridge Research Chair in Psychosocial Oncology and professor in the department of oncology at Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary in Canada, to learn more about the ASCO/SIO guideline that she and an expert committee prepared, why they are important for patients and how patients with cancer can advocate for themselves to obtain care related to integrative oncology.

CURE®: Why are these guidelines so important?

Carlson: We know that patients suffer high levels of anxiety and depression, quite commonly around the time of diagnosis, but also going forward through transitions in care, the end of care, trying to get back into regular life. And so anxiety and depression symptoms can haunt people for a very long time.

At the same time, there’s no really good pharmacological treatments, … and many people prefer to go non-pharmacological, more natural routes.

The integrative therapies, the mind-body therapies that are in this guideline are proven. You can see through the evidence they help decrease symptoms of anxiety and depression. And so they’re non-pharmacological alternatives for patients to help cope with these difficult symptoms.

What exactly is integrative oncology?

The definition of integrative oncology … is this idea that it’s incorporating a whole-person system of care that incorporates conventional treatments, as well as complementary therapies where appropriate to help manage symptoms throughout the continuum, from prevention through lifestyle interventions, things like exercise and nutrition, right through treatment with modalities like the mind-body therapies, natural health products, and into survivorship and even end of life.

The idea is that it’s consistent with the person’s beliefs and values. It takes these complementary therapies that have an evidence base to them, applies them throughout the whole cancer journey to improve treatment tolerance and symptom reduction.

Is integrative oncology meant for all patients regardless of disease, stage and other factors?

Absolutely. The evidence base is a bit lacking for some of the rarer forms of cancer. A lot of the research has been done on women with breast cancer. So there’s definitely some holes in the evidence that have limited the kinds of recommendations that could go into the guideline, because the guideline’s based on very strict criteria, randomized-controlled trials, etc. There have been many studies done with more diverse groups of patients, but not enough to get some of those things in the guideline.

Another side note is that just because a complementary therapy may not be included in the guideline, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t helpful or it doesn’t work. It just means there hasn’t been enough research to date. So for example, things like energy therapies or massage may still have potential, but just didn’t make it into the guideline because there hasn’t been the research done yet.

The strongest recommendation was given to mindfulness-based interventions like stress reduction, meditation and mindful movement. Can you go into more detail about what those are?

We use mindfulness-based interventions as an umbrella term to talk about, usually adaptations that stem from the mindfulness-based stress reduction program that was developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn back in the 1970s.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction has been around for about 40 years, but there’s many different takes on it, different adaptations. So there’s some that are specific for people with cancer, like mindfulness-based cancer recovery, or mindfulness-based stress reduction for breast cancer, there’s mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. But what these all have in common is they’re usually group programs, they usually meet once a week over a period of six to eight weeks.

And people are taught mindfulness meditation techniques. So usually, they practice at home for 20 minutes a day or so of meditation on the breath, on the body. And mindfulness is really this idea of bringing awareness into the present moment, non-judgmentally with kindness, self-compassion with openness. And so the meditation is training people on how to do that in a systematic way. Because often our minds are trained to be out of the present moment. We’re either reliving the past and saying, “Why me? If only this or that.” We have regrets, we get depressed or we’re worrying about the future. The mind’s going off to what if this? What if that? How am I going to cope, all the terrible things that could happen, the pressures. And so, we worry and get anxious.

Depression, regret, worry, anxiety, it’s all caused by the past and future focus. But mindfulness training is more about living in the moment. It’s easy to say, it’s a simple idea, but it’s not easy to do. So the mindfulness based intervention trains people in that capacity to be in the present moment, through sitting meditation, body scan, different kinds of awareness practices, everyday mindfulness.

Usually, they have the form of mindfulness meditation practice. And they also have mindful movement, or yoga, incorporated in them. And that is around bringing awareness into the body, learning to identify when there’s stress or tension, identifying our triggers of stress, we even get into the stories we tell ourselves and the interpretations we make and how that elevates stress. There are many components to a mindfulness-based intervention. But we do know that the studies, many of them have consistently shown that they really help people cope with anxiety and depression.

There has always been some thought that any form of mindfulness would be beneficial for patients with cancer. But why was it so important to put these into a formalized guideline?

The way the medical system works is that the guidelines drive treatment decisions, and they drive insurance reimbursement. So while many people have experienced these therapies and know they’re helpful, until we have it formalized with a recommendation from a trusted body like ASCO, like SIO, that’s the first step in really making it standard of care. In fact, it makes it almost compulsory that for cancer centers to be credited as comprehensive cancer centers, they need to include these types of therapies.

The recommendations around mindfulness-based interventions, the language is “should;” people with cancer should have access, not “may,” which is the less strong language. But they should be part of comprehensive cancer care because we know they’re helpful, and they’re less harmful than other pharmacological approaches and more useful, they’re more effective.

There’s no reason why we shouldn’t take advantage of these relatively low-cost interventions with very few side effects, little harm and make those available to everybody. Everybody who’s suffering from anxiety and depression can benefit. So this is a really important institutional step in moving more towards that idea of having them really part of standard of care.

If a patient thinks that this would be a good fit for their care, how should they bring it up to their cancer team?

I would advise patients to get a copy of those guidelines and put them on the desk the next time they go to see the oncologist and say, “How come we don’t have these programs at our cancer center? Why do I have to go to the community and seek this out and pay out of my pocket? Why isn’t this covered by my insurance?” I think we need the patients to stand up and advocate. And they can use (this guideline) as a tool, a very strong tool to help them do that.

This transcription has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.

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DUBLIN, July 19, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — The “The Future of Mental Health Management” report has been added to  ResearchAndMarkets.com’s offering.

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This report identifies the challenges, drivers, and growth opportunities in this space and helps foresee its growth outlook. It also provides an overview of the stakeholder ecosystem, identifying notable mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships.

Mental health conditions reduce people’s life expectancy – yet mental health takes a distant second place to physical health in many instances. This is slowly changing after the COVID-19 pandemic triggered rising cases of anxiety and depression, as have other geopolitical conditions and natural calamities. With rising awareness, new treatments emerge that can complement existing therapies for better outcomes.

Treating mental health issues is challenging because a condition may have varying causes, such as environmental and genetic factors, and different symptoms present themselves in different degrees. As a result, combining therapies – instead of using a single therapy – could result in better efficacy.

Psychotherapy and medication have been long-standing treatment methods, and now more advanced techniques for diagnosis and treatment can prove beneficial for people with limited access to a clinic, like telehealth consultations or the use of virtual reality, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and the use of wearables for detecting a symptom and notifying a medical professional.

These advanced technologies help serve patients throughout the day and not just during emergencies, which closes the gaps in care. Research is also underway for biomarkers and other diagnostic tools that can detect a mental health condition, surpassing the traditional technique of monitoring symptoms for a certain period.

Much development is also undergoing in the nootropic space. Nootropics, generally used to improve brain performance, are available without a medical prescription. Microbiome therapeutics and naturally available substances are another area being explored further for therapeutic benefits.

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Finally, the report provides a detailed account of the funding landscape for stakeholders and market players to leverage.

Key Topics Covered:

1. Strategic Imperatives

• Factors Creating Pressure on Growth

• The Strategic Imperative

• The Impact of the Top 3 Strategic Imperatives on the Mental Health Industry

• Growth Opportunities Fuel the Growth Pipeline Engine

• Research Methodology

2. Scope and Segmentation

3. Growth Opportunity Analysis

• Growth Drivers

• Growth Restraints

4. Introduction

5. Innovation Ecosystem

• An Introduction to Mental Health Conditions

• Treatment Approaches to Mental Health

• Drug-based Therapeutic Intervention in Mental Health

• A Snapshot of Schizophrenia Research

• A Snapshot of Anxiety Research

• A Snapshot of Depression Research

• A Snapshot of BD Research

• A Snapshot of Eating Disorder, Sleeping Disorder, PTSD, and Substance Use Research

• Upcoming Innovations in the Field of Mental Health

• Brain Boosting Nutraceuticals/Nootropics

• Telehealth Services to Cater to All Age Groups

• Self-help, Meditation, and Mindfulness Mobile Applications

• Virtual Reality, AI and Machine Learning for Mental Health Management

• Diagnostics and Biomarker Development for Mental Health Conditions

• Innovation Ecosystem Summary

6. Regulatory

• The Mental Health Landscape in Europe and the United States

• The Mental Health Landscape in Select Asia-Pacific (APAC) Countries

• The Mental Health Landscape in Select APAC Countries and the Middle East

• The Mental Health Landscape in Other Select Countries

7. Intellectual Property

8. Stakeholder Ecosystem

• Strategic Partnerships Between Mental Health-focused Companies

• Funding Ecosystem

• Mergers and Acquisitions in Mental Health Industry

• Key Takeaways from the Stakeholder Ecosystem

9. Growth Opportunity Universe

• Growth Opportunity 1: Complementing Prescription Therapies with AI/ML/VR for Better Outcomes in Mental Health Management

• Growth Opportunity 2: The Development of Targeted Prescription Treatments

• Growth Opportunity 3: Benchmarking Mental Health Applications Based on Efficacy Evidence

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/qxz3rf

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