Drawing as a beginning: Case report

Treatment of patients with affective disorders during hospitalisation at the Institute of Mental Health includes pharmacotherapy, individual supportive therapy, group and expressive therapies including art therapy. Art therapy takes a place weekly, it lasts one hour during which patients paint for twenty minutes and then discuss their paintings in the group for the next forty minutes. In this paper the case of a patient who has been treated as recurrent depressive disorder (F33) and mixed personality disorder (F61) is presented. During previous years of treatment the patient had no inability to verbalise his symptoms and feelings, which led to difficult understanding of his actual psychopathology. After applied integrative treatment, pharmaco – and psychotherapy including expressive – art therapy, with the help of the supportive group, the patient for the first time since the beginning of the treatment spoke about his thoughts and feelings of hopelessness, sorrow, alienation and loneliness. All of the applied psychometric scales have shown improvement, for depression – MADRS, for anxiety – VAS and for functionality – SDS. This clinical example shows how the art therapy and interreaction with the group, which was supportive and highly associative, can turn the non-verbal into verbal and non-communication into communication.