Art Allows Sick Kids to Express Their Fears

Twice a week Martine Benatar offers young patients at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center the one thing nearly everyone around them takes away: freedom.

A volunteer art therapist, Benatar totes pastels, markers and paper from one bedside to another, providing children with serious illnesses creative control over their own artwork.

In the process, say her colleagues at Miller Children’s Hospital, Benatar gently coaxes out valuable expressions of children’s fears about hospital life.

While her young friends are free to choose their subject, the images they produce often speak of pre-surgery anxieties and feelings of helplessness as they await medical recovery.

Recently, Benatar recalls, a little boy drew the troubling scene of a ship headed for stormy waters. Although she said she usually shies from interpreting the drawings, she saw the work as a sign of fear and was able to intervene. After a time, she asked the child to redraw the picture in a more upbeat setting.

“Sometimes you can convince the child to draw the boat coming out of the bad weather,” she said. “It’s positive thinking, positive solutions.”

Hilda Kwok, a clinical psychologist at Miller’s, consults with Benatar once a week to discuss the children’s work and how therapy might address any signs of distress. Kwok called Benatar’s work “a cathartic tool.”

“It’s a form of coping,” Kwok said. “It provides a safe means of expression for kids who are dealing with a lot of out-of-control feelings within themselves.”

Hospital executive director Mel Marks said art therapy, which had been cut from the hospital budget until Benatar began volunteering in January, fits well into the hospital’s “psycho-emotional” approach to therapy.

“It’s been very, very positive and [parents] love it,” Marks said.

At the turn of the century, educators and researchers became interested in children’s art as symbolic of their emotional and physical states. It finally emerged as its own field of training in the 1930s. The therapy is now applied in educational as well as correctional facilities.

Benatar, originally from South Africa, said she learned the therapeutic value of art while working as an intern at a Bronx hospital.

“Often, a distraction from other things that are going on in the hospital is therapy enough,” she said.