Film/video-based therapy
This page needs attention!!!! If you have editing and writing skills and wish to contribute your time to help clean up this site, please feel free to do so. I appreciate the free publicity from certain individuals who like to poke fun at the need for more help, but I am understaffed and the need for help with military veterans is a serious issue and film/video-based therapy could use your support in supporting our troops. Thank you.
Film/video-based therapy involves making movies with clients. It draws from several disciplines from Cinema therapy* expressive therapy, Narrative therapy, art therapy, *Digital storytelling, and phototherapy which requires a collaboration to integrate the many dynamic aspects of art and medicine. Joshua Lee Cohen, Ph.D, author And Co-editor of Video and Filmmaking as Psychotherapy: Research and Practice (published by Routledge in 2015), helped to establish a collaborative effort in forming film/video-based therapy. This form of therapy is AbOUT making films with clients, as opposed to cinema therapy, which is about watching films.
Film/Video-based therapy is used in both research and practice. It has several names. Each name has a slightly different purpose for each population.
Therapeutic filmmaking is used for both veterans and therapists and is left intentionally ambiguous, so that the military will not be intimidated by the stigma of a diagnosis.
Video Remix Therapy
Video Art Therapy is used primarily in private practice with art therapists, drama therapists, and other expressive art therapists.
Digital storytelling is also used in collaboration with film/video-based therapy and is used primarily for education.
Storytelling is an indigenous and ancient way for people to relate to one another and to understand the mysteries of life. Using modern technology, artists have used film and video for expressing ancient and modern images and sounds.
Film/video-based therapy is a collaboration between clinicians and practitioners in art therapy, expressive therapy, phototherapy, psychotherapy, Digital storytelling and other mental health and academic fields of study and practice. Currently art therapists, expressive therapists, psychologists, masters level practitioners, psychiatrists, anthropologists, filmmakers, academics, and other clinicians have contributed to this collaborative effort in building a Global Community to help further define this field. The use of film and video in, or as, therapy, has a decades-long history in practice. Early work in this field included the post-World War II use of experimental, non-narrative films to calm veterans suffering from shell shock. The 1970s saw boys in a group creating short films together to foster group cohesion, mastery skills, and better communication. With the advent of portable video equipment in the 1970s, female artists began turning the camera on themselves, making themselves the object of their own GAZE.
There is a dearth of literature on the theory and practice of using film/video production as therapy and the multidisciplinary practitioners who support its use. Copious literature exists discussing the use of related media in a therapeutic context, such as photography, writing, drawing, music, and drama, but this body of literature is virtually vacant of film/video as a therapeutic medium.
Despite the fact that there is little writing in this area, numerous practitioners from around North America and Europe are quietly working with Film/video-based therapy – often independently, as the community of practitioners is still quite small and geographically scattered.
This is an attempt to bridge that gap and bring people together as a global community and new research and practices are emerging. An international conference for Film/video-based therapy is expected to take place in the United States by 2017.