It was April 2011. I was on the way back home after completing an art therapy foundation course. I had just picked my four young children up and I was driving home.
I remember driving along the motorway singing with my boys. I remember thinking the car behind was far too close.
I remember thinking what a life-changing week I had just completed and how much I had enjoyed the course.
I remember the loud, unrecognisable noise that stopped us in our tracks, the air bags popping and the car filling with white smoke.
I remember checking my children to make sure they were okay, the sirens, and thinking “are they for us?” – I remember looking at the wreckage in tears and wondering how we all came out unscathed.
Now, more than 10 years later, the only evidence of this event is a single photograph of the wreckage that I asked my husband to take when he got to the scene. I now look back on what was a traumatic event with peace.
I thought the art therapy course would primarily help me to support my students in the behaviour unit I worked in at the time as an art teacher. They all displayed social emotional mental health difficulties such as anxiety, self-harm, low self-esteem, and psychosis. The art they made in my lessons was a way for them to explore their own understanding of the difficulties they were facing and struggling to process.
Little did I realise the impact the course would have on my own wellbeing over the following years.
The power of art therapy
It is acknowledged that art therapy can have a dramatic effect on people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders, helping in the healing process of both physical and psychological symptoms (Braito et al, 2021; Uttley et al, 2015).
The techniques I learnt on that one-week course had a lasting and profound impact on my teaching practice.
In schools, we are expected to support children who are increasingly likely to have mental health issues (Newlove-Delgado et al, 2022), but we have no training to do so. And we may not be in a mentally strong position to be the anchor that others require.
On the course we were encouraged to look at images and objects individually in a new way. Play with the image or object and say what it reminds us of. Thinking about images and learning to associate them on a subconscious level was a powerful experience.
The art our students produce communicates something to us that they may not be aware of at the time of making. Our subconscious mind knows what colours we need, what scene we should set, what angst we should communicate in our work.
I believe that being creative in any form and using that as an outlet can be effective – whether it is through music, art, textiles, writing, drama, or dance.
My therapy through the arts is photography, textiles, and painting. It was amazing to be able to share that passion with my students, many of whom had been put off art in their previous mainstream schools.
Once they found out that they were free to explore and discover their own styles they always warmed to the subject. In our centre, art was compulsory and had a big presence around the school.
We had a variety of students who had been placed in our centre because they couldn't cope in mainstream. Their schools had been unable to support their mental health needs. We had refugees from Afghanistan, Eritrea, and other countries – children from all over Europe whose parents/guardians had sent them unaccompanied. All in search of a better life.
Children from traveller families, children who had witnessed violence and abuse, been subject to abuse themselves, who were orphans, who had been placed with foster families, or who had been groomed and/or exploited by gangs.
All sitting side-by-side communicating with each other, despite the language and cultural barriers, through their art. To me, that was the purpose of art, an outlet for our emotions and feelings.
My journey with art
Art has been the thing that has saved me as well, repeatedly. After I left school, I completed an art foundation course and I discovered a love for photography. After that, I pursued a degree in photo media. My tutor encouraged me to become a teacher.
I started off as a mainstream art and design teacher and was made head of department in my first year. When I was a mainstream teacher, I always had a connection with those children that others would call “hard to teach”. They just seemed to gravitate to my lessons and to my clubs.
One year 11 boy was asked to go on study leave early due to his behaviour, but I managed to get him to come in everyday to work on his art coursework and his only GCSE pass was in art. I’ll never forget the moment he shouted at me in the street: “Oi miss, thanks for my C!”
Over my career, I moved increasingly into working with young people with special needs.
The revelation
And then last summer (2022), I found out I was neurodivergent myself. I have ADHD. This was after being diagnosed with a condition called Meniere’s – a vestibular condition which causes an imbalance within the inner ear.
The initial symptoms are loss of hearing, tinnitus, and dizziness/vertigo. It is believed to be caused by stress, but it does respond to changes in lifestyle such as exercise, diet, and managing stress.
There is a link between Meniere’s and meningitis, which I had when I was a toddler. There can be a link between meningitis (and other brain injuries) and ADHD (Hadzic et al, 2017) – so I investigated further.
In the UK, adults have been able to get a diagnosis of ADHD since 2008, but waiting lists are long. Like many, I decided to go privately for my diagnosis because I began to understand that not knowing how and why my brain worked like it did would have a negative impact on me for the rest of my life.
For me, my ADHD is not an attention deficit. It is trying to attend to too much information at once and not being able to shut off and focus on just one train of thought. When I was diagnosed with ADHD, I was advised to have an assessment for dyslexia.
Dyslexia is a learning difficulty which primarily affects reading and writing skills. However, it does not only affect these skills. Dyslexia is about information processing. Dyslexic people may have difficulty processing and remembering information they see and hear, which can affect learning and the acquisition of literacy skills. Dyslexia can also impact on other areas such as organisational skills.
So here I am, six months later, having gone from someone with no known disabilities to being diagnosed with three. As I was fostered from the age of three to 13, I didn't know that much about my medical history and whether the meningitis I had as a toddler had indeed caused me my difficulties all along.
I know now that hearing loss is the most common after-effect of bacterial meningitis, but I have learnt from my mother that I only had one follow up appointment after I was discharged from hospital.
I managed to get through school, but I was always being told off for not concentrating, being easily distracted or for distracting others, being the class clown, messing around – but I was funny and I had a great personality that got me through, just like my students in the PRU.
As a qualified SENCO, of course I had suspicions of my own needs. But I was so focused on the needs of the children I supported and that of my own children, I neglected my own. As many teachers tend to do.
People have asked me if I wish I’d known when I was younger. My answer is no. I think that I would not have got as far as I have in my career as a Black woman with the added barriers of neurodivergence.
We have come a long way in the last 40 years but not far enough to make me believe that my experiences of school would have been better.
A new direction
And so, as I was coming to the end of my time as a headteacher in a special school, I decided to leave full-time school leadership. I started to think back to my time studying art therapy and how much I'd enjoyed it. I decided to apply for an advanced diploma in the therapeutic and educational application of the arts.
During the group interview (which thanks to Covid was online), I felt like I was in a room with people just like me, who were open about their experiences and how art had helped to heal them over the years.
We got to the final part of the evening and the lecturer said: “Tell me one thing that you don’t want us to know.” What a question.
I thought to all those things over the years, the way that I had unknowingly masked so that I could fit in, not knowing that I had a hearing impairment, not knowing that I was neurodivergent.
I didn't want it to be a secret and I wanted to feel comfortable sharing it in public. So, I said: “I want you to know that I'm neurodivergent and I want you to know that I have a hearing impairment.”
After saying that, I felt so at peace. I finally felt like my inner and outer aligned and that I was being my authentic self. I left that interview thinking how life-changing that course could be, not just for myself but for people I could help through my training.
The next day I got an email saying I'd been accepted onto the course. So now, after 20 years in education, I’m about to embark on a completely different journey but one that still embraces my love of education and my love for the arts.
I hope that by sharing my journey, it will help other people to see that the saying is true: when one door closes another one opens. It might be a door that you had closed many years ago and it's just been waiting to be reopened.
- Frances Akinde is a SEND advisor, art advocate and neurodiversity champion. She is a former secondary special headteacher.
Further information & resources
- Braito et al: Systematic review of effectiveness of art psychotherapy in children with mental health disorders. Irish Journal of Medical Science (191), July 2021: http://bit.ly/3xyyVdq
- Hadzic, Sinanovic & Memisevic: Is bacterial meningitis a risk factor for developing ADHD?, Israel Journal of Psychiatry (54,2), 2017.
- Lyshak-Stelzer et al: Art Therapy for Adolescents with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms: A Pilot Study, Art Therapy, 24:4, 2007.
- Newlove-Delgado et al: Mental Health of Children and Young People in England 2022, NHS Digital, November 2022: http://bit.ly/3AX0zTC
- Schouten et al: Trauma-Focused Art Therapy in the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Pilot Study. J Trauma Dissociation. 2019 Jan-Feb;20(1)
- Talwar: Accessing traumatic memory through art making: An art therapy trauma protocol (ATTP), The Arts in Psychotherapy, Volume 34, Issue 1, 2007.
- Uttley et al: Systematic review and economic modelling of the clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of art therapy among people with non-psychotic mental health disorders, Health Technology Assessment, (19,18), March 2015.