Poetry As Medicine

Photo: griffert | Pixabay

There’s a growing body of evidence in the medical scientific literature to support the use of poetry and the arts in clinical practice – to enhance empathy, communication skills, and both patient and clinician wellbeing. I saw this in an article from the Irish Times by a doctor (unfortunately, the article requires a subscription) who admits that "As a medic, it took me a while to appreciate this." There's a special relationship between poetry and medicine, and great value that physicians, other healthcare professionals, and patients could derive from making better use of this art form.

I have been doing some research into this and considering it for a future writing prompt.It is not just writing poetry that can heal.  I have seen studies that show that patients who read poetry together experience decreased pain and symptoms of depression.

Other studies found that poetry can sharpen listening, attentiveness, observation, and analytical skills. It can refine the artistic side of medicine: Poetry allows us to express ourselves, fosters creativity, and accepts ambiguity. It enhances empathy, self-awareness, and introspection.

There is a National Association for Poetry Therapy which is about the use of language, symbol, and story in therapeutic, educational, growth, and community-building capacities. It relies upon the use of poems, stories, song lyrics, imagery, and metaphor to facilitate personal growth, healing, and greater self-awareness.

I would not claim that poetry can heal physical ailments but writing and reading poetry can be healing and transformative because poems reflect the voice of the soul. Writing - poetry, journaling, memoir etc. -  is a way to nurture a mindfulness practice because when writing (maybe especially with poems), we have the chance to unleash the unconscious mind.

Studies using MRIs show that poetry causes the part of the brain that activates during daydreaming to light up while reading or listening to poetry. It can "brighten" the brain and improve memory. Poetry often sticks with the reader, causing them to re-read and even memorize the words.

I ran a workshop for healthcare professionals a few years ago and found several books that were useful in preparing for the sessions.

  

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Prompt: Tools of the Trade

Early surgical tools

What is a tool every new physician needs? In Scotland, they are thinking it is a book of poetry. Medical students there receive a book of poetry intended to help them recharge and be mindful of the human aspect of their vocation.

An article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) alerted me to this program where the graduating medical students in Scotland receive a free copy of a poetry book titled Tools of the Trade: Poems for New Doctors. The pocket-size book is less than 100 pages and designed to be carried while on duty. Poems are grouped into five themes: looking after yourself, looking after others, beginnings, being with illness, and endings. The anthology was put together by the Scottish Poetry Library.

The gift is offered simply as a compassionate friendly gesture. As editors Dr Lesley Morrison and Dr John Gillies write in their introduction: "To care and be compassionate to others, we first need to be compassionate, to look after, to be kind to ourselves."

Some of the poets are or were doctors themselves, and all the poems speak in some way to the experience of being a junior doctor. Different poems will suit different situations, and readers.

“I remind students in their first week that neglect [of patients] is a real consequence of disregarding the human aspect of what we do,” says David Crossman, dean of the medical school at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, and chief scientist for Scotland. “These poems just bring you back and help you understand who you are talking to.”

 

The article started me thinking about the kinds of poems I might include in anthologies for other trades and professions. Every job has its tools. Poetry is usually not one of them.

An artist has tools of the trade. The backyard gardener has tools. I wonder what poems we would give them to help in their work?

Our writing prompt for March is to write a poem intended for someone in a particular job. That might your own profession or one that you once aspired to, or something you know very little about but find interesting. It should be a poem that would help them in their work. Maybe it helps them deal with the problems that come with the job, or helps inspire them, or reminds them why they chose to do what they do. 

Submission deadline: Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Poetry Therapy and Healing

Each of us has a unique part to play in the healing of the world. - Marianne Williamson

Readers of this blog and poetry contributors to Poets Online don't need to be told that poetry can contribute to healing. As readers and as writers of poetry, we can all think of instances when a poem helped us or someone we know to heal.

Healing can be taken literally, as in coping with diseases both physical and mental. And healing can be seen as that process that moves us through transformation and into growth from a bad place to a better one.

In "Finding the Words to Say It: The Healing Power of Poetry", Robert Carroll writes about his use of poetry (his own and others) to facilitate healing.

In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, poetry sprang up everywhere. A New York Times article on October 1, 2001, documented the phenomenon: “In the weeks since the terrorist attacks, people have been consoling themselves—and one another—with poetry in an almost unprecedented way … Improvised memorials often conceived around poems sprang up all over the city, in store windows, at bus stops, in Washington Square Park, Brooklyn Heights, and elsewhere. …” 

Some catastrophes are so large, they seem to overwhelm ordinary language. Immediately after the recent tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia, the Los Angeles Times reported the witnesses were literally dumbstruck. Words failed them. They had lost their voices. 

In mainstream culture, there are subjects we do not talk about. They are taboo. For example, even though each of us is going to die, we don't talk about dying. Instead, we avoid it. Even physicians are reluctant to talk with terminally ill patients about the patient's experience... 

Poetry gives us ways to talk about it. My job as a poetry therapist is to use poetry and voice to help people get access to the wisdom they already have but cannot experience because they cannot find the words in ordinary language.

I wouldn't recommend poetry as "alternative medicine" or a substitute for traditional medicine, but I would recommend it as a supplement to any treatments.

For our writing prompt this month, I am more interested in the figurative sense of healing, but there are certainly many examples of poets who have used the more literal sense of healing in their poems.

You may not be aware of "poetry therapy" which is defined by the National Association for Poetry Therapy as "the intentional use of the written and spoken word to facilitate healing, growth and transformation." Their membership includes mental health providers, medically trained physicians, nurses, educators, and artists, writers and others who use poems or the writing process as a healing practice.

I have always found that being out in nature feels like healing to me. This feeling is captured simply in "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry.  He says "When despair for the world grows in me" that he will "lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds."

What is it that we find there that feels like it can heal us? I think we envy at moments like that the wild things "who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief" and want to be in that freeing place, if only for a short time.

Our September writing prompt is simply "healing."

Submission deadline: September 30, 2016

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There is a very good list of healing poems at writingandhealing.org, and the collection, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, also has good examples, and there are many articles online, such as "Poetry and Healing."