59-05-032 Proceeding

263 Proceedings of the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Congress ART THERAPY INITIATIVE San San Oo 1 and Aung Min 2 1 Psychiatrist, community mental health clinic, Yangon, Myanmar 2 General medical doctor and art therapist, general health clinic, Yangon, Myanmar Years back in Myanmar, the therapy to mentally ills was the psychotropic drugs, ECT (Electro Convulsive Therapy), physical restraints with lock and chains and few counseling services. This psychiatric care only is to solve the challenging mental and behavioral problems in the psychiatric hospital or psychiatric clinic based settings. Even the post admission follow up care continued the medications alone as long run and main stay management. The hospital based rehab center has programmed some residential chronic patients to enter the format of hierarchical Buddhist meditation. The patients were kept moving in line entered the meditation hall. Some of them have reported that the process – just sitting long in silence 1 – made them uncomfortable and they just wished to stop doing it.This rehabilitation setting also provided the recreational or hobby art (drawing the paintings) practice. Some chronic patients took part in the activity. A patient drew up the few color lines and labeled those as ‘Bala Min Htin bridge’ ( the newly built bridge named after a Knight in Burmese king era) but no (profession/therapist) one worked with him to read or interpret his art (work) and gave the help there. Next days the chief psychiatrist brought the 10 paintings of good-looking, realistic drawings on ethnic people and beautiful flowers to be shown off in his consultant room as art. As consequence there was no way to either address the relationship of art and person or initiate the arts as therapy. On the other hand, the uniqueness about the diversities of mental health issues and unsolved problems is really the challenge. In spite of already formal management there is still the room to work out much to meet the needs of individual differences from various backgrounds. Many times, the person’s mental health and behavioral issues require help beyond the formal therapies or interventions. The art therapy initiative has been integral part of the existingmental health care integrated with general health care clinic 2 in per urban Yangon since 2013. This integrating art therapy into medical facilities aims to use the art is tools in holistic mental health care including evidence based practice concepts.This clinic is the center for health andwell-being of its neighborhood community. More than 15 years this clinic center has developed well relationship to the community around and this relationship has known about individual patients and their relatives and families’ health including mental health histories and their background. The environment of the community is composed of multi-ethnic people, internal migrants, native per urban dwellers including grassroots people, orphanage and theology school, public schools, the company workers, new construction sites, churches, Buddhistmonasteries, mosques. By the country background, it was reported that the commonmental healthproblems usually run the chronicity. 3 and always impact the affected persons and their families in terms of loss of well-being, impairment in functioning, stigmatization, and discrimination, lack of social inclusion, delayed recovery, relapses, family burden and hopelessness,