Art Therapy

Let’s be honest – we all need some therapy. But lying on a couch, wailing about why we hate our fathers and that time we were publicly humiliated in the locker rooms at school, is a little too cliché for our liking (though the pill-popping cliché seems right up our alley). We like to think of ourselves as creative types so if we’re committing to therapy, it has to live up to our artistic inclinations. In comes Art Therapy – a group of trained therapists are here to save our minds by encouraging us to create art and then telling us what it says about our minds.

Although people began researching the concept in the late 1900s, art therapy became a formal discipline in the 1940s, as a growing number of psychologists and other health care professionals realised that art could have a valuable place in psychiatric treatment. It’s only been in Cairo for a little while now, but has already piqued the interests of crazies and non-crazies alike. But before you think that this is some kind of quack gimmick, Shima Youssef and Suzan Radwan, the brains behind the Art Therapy movement in Egypt are fully licensed psychiatrists. That means they’re real doctors and they know what you’re talking about.