‘Creative Care and the Capacity to Play’ – An excerpt from The Creative Arts in Dementia Care, by Jill Hayes with Sarah Povey

“In working in dementia care we need often to let ourselves become foolish, unconventional, stop making sense. I have been thrilled to meet staff who at the drop of a hat will dress up, play the guitar, sing uproariously…or who have the capacity to sit quietly with someone without an agenda. It is this joy of the crazy and the still, this lightness of being, which is refreshing and life-promoting in the work that we do. We can play with balloons, blow bubbles, doodle, improvise. We don’t have to make a finished product. By creatively and somatically being with a person we can instil a sense of safety, of physical and emotional security.”

Lisa Jo Rudy On Beyond Therapy: How to Get Started in the Community with Your Child on the Autism Spectrum

“Kids with autism spectrum disorders get an awful lot of therapy…[all] in support of a single goal. In the long run, we hope, kids with autism will grow up to be adults who enjoy their lives and achieve to their fullest potential. In an ideal world, we hope they’ll learn to navigate interpersonal relationships, build friendships or even romances, work in a job of their choosing, and operate as independently as a typically developing child.

The truth is, though, that neither school nor a therapist’s office is an ideal setting for meeting new people, exercising new skills, finding shared interests, or just having fun in the world…”

Lisa Jo Rudy on How Families of Children with Autism or Asperger Syndrome Can Get the Most out of Community Activities

“Autism can be an incredibly isolating disorder. Not only do parents wind up spending a huge amount of their time, energy, money and love on therapies and care – they also feel like outsiders in their own communities and families. It can be even worse for siblings who, through no fault of their own, are often excluded from ordinary activities. By getting out and getting involved in the community as it’s possible, families are able to reconnect with clubs, churches and synagogues, sports leagues… and often with their own families. Another huge plus for getting out into the world with a child on the autism spectrum is that families discover their child’s real strengths and abilities in ways that would never be possible in the school or therapeutic settings.”

Dr. Darold Treffert on Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired, and Sudden Savant

“…new cases of the acquired savant — neurotypical persons in whom savant skills emerged, sometimes at a prodigious level, following brain injury or disease when no such skills were evident pre-incident — have convinced me that we have vastly underestimated brain plasticity and the brain’s ability to repair itself when damaged through rewiring, recruitment and release. This new neurologic optimism — the brain’s ability to renew and repair itself — has vast implications not only for better understanding and intervening in autism and related conditions, but provides much more hope and enthusiasm for intervention post-stroke, for example, or for treatment of a variety of other CNS conditions formerly viewed much more pessimistically.”

Deborah Plummer on Imagework and Helping Children to Cope with Change, Stress and Anxiety

“When a child comes up with an image that represents how he feels about a situation, he is tapping into something that goes way beyond logical thought processes. And when he realises that he can ‘play’ with these images and be creative in forming new images, then he can begin to take more control. Imagework often triggers insights and shifts in perspective which may not come through logical thinking alone.”