In a climate of resignation towards what is happening around us, and of atrophy in communication and intellectual interests, the Collage Group of the Day Center for Adolescents and Young Adults found a common ground of creativity and play, in order to awaken thought and unlock its inner world. At a time when everything seems to be falling to “pieces”, we took up the “weapons” of our art, our scissors, and cut hundreds of images into pieces. We deconstructed countless memories, feelings and fragments of the patients’ stories, so as to transform and regenerate them and compose them into a harmonious, unified psychic and symbolic frame of art, one that can shed new awareness on the individual and their surroundings.
In the clinical setting, psychotherapy tries to restore the adolescent’s dialogue with themselves and with others, and to offer an emotional “home” where the young person will listen, be heard and change. For us, art is the mediator of that change, and its ultimate aim is always to produce language, or more precisely speech, where it is missing. The finished collage will therefore carry a truth. For an image, even when it is not understood, reveals, and is always in search of the truth…
Renoir once said that what is essential in a painting is what you cannot explain. Nor can anyone explain a psychotherapeutic process. The aim of exhibiting these works is to let people feel some truth about the psyche of young people, from substance to the essential, from the stagnation of drug use to change, to vision, to life itself.
The Adolescent and Young Adult Unit was founded in 1993 by the Therapeutic Team of the Rehabilitation Unit (18 Ano) of the Psychiatric Hospital of Attica, in response to calls for help from young people with dependencies and their parents, who wanted to be freed from the suffering that substance abuse had brought into their lives. It is aimed at adolescents and young people up to the age of 22, at parents, and at people in their circle. It is staffed by a multidisciplinary team (psychologists, social workers, drama therapists, specialist therapists and other professionals) with clinical experience in the field of addiction treatment, who are specially trained in the psychological issues of adolescence and youth. It provides an outpatient therapeutic programme for young people, aimed at understanding the causes of their involvement in substance use and abuse, and a counselling role for parents. The therapeutic process is individualized, requires the voluntary participation of the young people, and is psychotherapeutic in character. It aims to form a decision to abstain permanently from substance use and to reorganize psychological life. Treatment unfolds through individual and group sessions, art workshops, drama therapy, physical education activities and cultural events.
The Adolescent Unit also provides: training for students of the humanities, prevention work with the general population, scientific activity, and a telephone information and referral service (210-3617089).
Opening: Friday, 21 November 2014 @ 19:00
Duration: 21/11/2014 – 23/11/2014
Opening hours: Fri 17:30 – 21:00 | Sat, Sun 11:00 – 14:30
