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Art therapy for coping with a cancer diagnosis
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A few years ago I went to a grand rounds by an art professor who produced a lot of work in response to a personal diagnosis of prostate cancer. Through that process he expanded his work to include community outreach, which he then took to be a group experience with other cancer survivors who created several different art pieces (film, music, paint). These other cancer survivors were not artists by any degree, but made amazing, beautiful works. The professor made a point of how artists in residence at a cancer center can be a very powerful healing tool for patients and their families
To name just a few cancer centers which already have artist-in-residence programs: New York University and the Washington Cancer Institute. University of Pennsylvania has a really cool web site called "Confronting Cancer Through Art"; many of the pieces are available to browse. UPenn has another site showing art from patients with pediatric cancer.
To further support this kind of program, a randomized controlled trial out of Sweden was released this past week that showed that art therapy helped improve coping for breast cancer patients who were undergoing radiation treatments. The author points out that this kind of research could rationally be expanded to apply to other cancer types as well.