A Swiss foundation

  • «Art and music touch places in the young patients where no injection can reach.»
    Petula Clark, singer, songwriter and patron of the Fondation ART-THERAPIE

  • «Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.»
    Albert Einstein

  • «Music can build bridges where the spoken language cannot.»
    Valeri Gergiev, conductor and opera company director, patron oft he Fondation ART-THERAPIE

  • «In a peripheral hospital, paediatrics is like a safe harbour»
    Dr. Valdo Pezzoli, head physician at the paediatrics department in the regional hospital of Lugano

  • «Art- and music therapy allow the patient to become immerged in another world.»
    C.B., art-therapist at University Children’s Hospital Zurich

  • «It is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.»
    Donald Woods Winnicott, English paediatrician and psychoanalyst

Breaking through the silence

A stay in hospital is often a drastic and painful experience for children and adolescents who are sick or who have had an accident. Art-therapy gives them the possibility of expressing themselves and their suffering with creativity and fantasy. This eases communication with their relatives and with the team treating them.

Art, music and dance therapies are innovative, gentle and non-invasive therapeutic approaches. They incorporate a multi-disciplinary concept for treatment and are tailored to each individual patient, and they promote and accelerate the healing process.

Art, music and dance therapies support the patients specifically and help them to:

  • express themselves in ways other than words
  • distance themselves from their pain and suffering
  • gain strength and to confront the illness
  • handle the hospital experience
  • strengthen self-esteem
  • improve the quality of life

For sick premature and new-born babies, the abrupt separation from the mother and the stay in the highly mechanised surroundings of the neonatology department is a traumatic experience.

Music therapy is an individual and appropriate way of stimulating and communicating at a time when other means of contact and therapy are not possible. It helps to:

  • calm breathing and the heart rhythm
  • sleep deeper
  • improve perception

Music therapy promotes

  • the development of a sustainable child-parent relationship
  • the development of the brain
  • later physical and pre-lingual development

Wide range of application

These therapies are used in cases of acute, chronic and psychosomatic illnesses, after accidents or surgery, for women with pregnancy risks and their vulnerable foetuses.

Many studies substantiate the beneficial healing effect.

Publications

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