AN ART student who battled crippling anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder has spoken of his belief that a unique art-led treatment devised in Austria may have led to a “faster recovery”, as he champions adopting a similar model in Scotland.
Drew Walker, a 28-year-old PhD student at Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee, will showcase the work of the celebrated ‘Gugging process’ as part of his doctorate studies and hopes to bring experts to Scotland to promote the technique as a complementary therapy alongside drugs and counselling.
The technique refers to an "assisted living" psychotherapy facility, known as the Gugging House of Artists near Vienna, which offers artistically talented people with mental illnesses or learning difficulties the chance to be artists first, and patients second. The centre, which sits alongside a museum, gallery and public studio, was founded in its current form 1981 and combines psychiatric treatment from mental health professionals with a push to enable the residents to exhibit and sell their artworks like any other artist as part of an ethos of de-stigmatisation and social re-integration.
Several of its residents, known as the 'Gugging Artists', have won acclaim for pieces known as Outsider Art.
"There's an element of hoping that through my research that I can help bring something back [to Scotland] that could provide an alternative, but not a replacement, to what's on offer," ssaid Mr Walker, who is heading out to the House of Artists later this month. "I'm hoping to bring the director of Gugging over here for a talk and spread the message."
Mr Walker first heard of the centre during a visit to an exhibition in Nottingham in 2013 where some Gugging artworks were on display. At the time, he was recovering after a falling ill at the end of his second year in art school with acute anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder which left his unable to leave the house or cope with everyday social situations. He was also diagnosed with mild Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism.
He said: "During those three years I really couldn't think about art or going out and being around people, it was difficult just to do normal things, so in that sense the medication for me and the treatment I had within the NHS provided the springboard but it was by going back to art school that I found a purpose and motivation to finish the recovery process and use the experience to turn it into more than just a label.
"It was a bit like a tribute to the illness because if I hadn't had the experience I would never have come back to art school and actually produced work that was maybe more interesting, and I wouldn't have discovered Gugging.
"For me, if I was living in Austria, it's something I would certainly have benefited from myself if I had access to that kind of model of actually making art and being less focused on the patient side. Maybe I would have interpreted things differently if I had gone through that process rather than going through the NHS and having this sort of drug-only therapy and CBT - it might have led to a faster recovery."
In contrast to its reputation as a model for cutting edge socio-therapeutic care today, Gugging also has a dark history as a place where hundreds of mental patients were murdered or abused by the Nazis. However, in the late 1950s, while the Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic was headed by psychiatrist Leo Navratil, began asking patients produce drawings for diagnostic purposes, paving the way to its later incarnation as an art centre.
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