ABSTRACT
Art therapists have traditionally worked with patients excluded from verbal psychotherapy services, beginning in the 1940s and 1950s with so-called ‘chronically mentally ill’ or ‘burnt out’ patients, later in the 1970s with the ‘severely mentally handicapped’ and in the past two decades with elderly dementing patients. As early as the 1860s, asylums housing chronically ill, psychotic patients and those suffering from ‘senile dementia’ were providing arts activities, but not all had access to the ‘entertainment’ they provided and the preferred option for such patients was work (Skailes, 1997: 199).
