I am an Art Therapist working in Forensic Mental Health Recovery Facility. Our service-users live in the facility and some in residences around the immediate community.

At work, my routine would mainly revolve around supporting and managing my service-users’ overall care plan. The most frequent of these will be the supervision, observations and documentation of their intake of prescribed medications.

This routine borders around compliance or enforcements. They are also often given support, in otherwise ordinary and rudimentary chores which for them, when left alone in their conditions is capable of heightening their stress, making them unsafe and increasing their chances of relapse.

There is a lot of seriousness around these activities, hence there is no much room for off-the-cuff chatter or conversations.

However they are encouraged to visit the office at their spare time, and without it being said, this is largely ignored.

Art therapy has taken me into its quiet, non intrusive, non judgmental and conciliatory ways of engaging and co-producing expressions, dialogues and conversations. This embodiment has changed my worldview with an imbued faith in the goodness of the human spirit.

As an art therapist I still interact with my service-users and all humans with the fervour to enable us all wilfully reflect on our shared humanity, index offences, while finding our own narratives, meanings and making changes in our behaviours.

Here, I am not officially paired with any service-users as their art therapist or as an art therapist. In fact there are virtually no referrals to the arts therapies in these communities.

But today I will escorting one of the service-users to an alcoholic desist-ant appointment. With the recent unreliable schedule of the buses, I can almost predict that we will have to undertake the twenty minutes journey on foot.

This promises to be an opportune time and I look forward to spending twenty minutes with him.

Co-Producing Dialogue towards a Therapeutic Relationship.

Leonard Chintua-Chigbu

Art Therapist.