ABSTRACT
Working in a community mental health team means working under pressure for much of the time. It is good that art psychotherapy is now much more well-known, but the result is often too many referrals for the capacity available. The community mental health team is multi-disciplinary and includes psychiatrists, community psychiatric nurses, mental health workers, psychologists, liaison workers with other agencies and a part-time art therapist. When the author started work in his community mental health team, he was aware of a short-term counselling service in the inner city, attached to primary care, offering up to 12 sessions of counselling, mainly for mental health problems around life events, such as bereavement, divorce, unemployment and so on. This chapter shows how it is possible to use art psychotherapy to do a time-limited piece of work, accomplishing some insight and progress.
