ABSTRACT
I have worked for about ten years as an art therapist in the area of mental health in London. Three years ago, I moved to New York, where I now work as an art therapist with patients with cancer at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. This chapter is about my personal reflections following this professional move to a different country and to a different patient population. It is also about how this experience led me to devise an art therapy intervention, which I have called The Creative Journey, which is quite different from the art therapy interventions I used to offer to psychiatric patients. Of course patients with cancer, although they share a similar traumatic experience, do not constitute a homogeneous population. Among them there may be patients with a psychiatric history, whose vulnerability has been revived; other patients may have developed a dysfunctional coping mechanism, like a substance abuse, in reaction to the stress of cancer diagnosis and treatment; others may go through a temporary stage of anxiety or depression, that will subside within an appropriate supportive environment; other patients seem to find the strength to cope in a mature way, without denial and without giving up, and they may ask for therapeutic help not because they are not coping, but because they know what they need, and they know how to ask for it.
