Burnout is a serious condition that affects more and more people. The Mental Health America (MHA) in a study conducted in July 2020 reported that 75% of workers have experienced burnout, and 40% of those polled said it was a direct result of the coronavirus pandemic. The current circumstances affect our way of interacting, working, and living, in general. Working from home has its advantages and disadvantages for everyone. Sometimes the working hours are mixed with the personal time, therefore the employee tends to dedicate more time in performing working tasks than before Covid 19 pandemic.
Cultural Prescriptions is a type of initiative that encourages people who deal with different medical conditions to overcome their negative states and to improve their health and well-being by using arts. Various models of cultural prescriptions was successfully tested in other countries, such as the UK. During the autumn of 2020, the Cluj Cultural Centre implements a pilot of cultural prescriptions, offering participation in a series of specially designed creative workshops to a group of people with burnout symptoms.
Built on practical exercises using various artistic techniques, the workshops contribute to the development of imagination and emotional intelligence, stimulate the ability to express, reduce anxiety and cultivate self-esteem with the final purpose to help people overcome their burnout with time.
The design of the creative workshops is the result of the collaboration of experts and researchers from the fields of arts and health. The creative activities will be delivered by a team of artists from Create.Act.Enjoy, a Cluj based NGO known for their Art Therapy project, a unique intervention model taking place annually in hospitals across Romania. The impact on participants’ well-being will be measured through quantitative and qualitative techniques by the same team of researchers and the results will be used as an argument for scaling up this type of initiatives.
The workshop will take place in Romanian. Those interested to participate are invited to register here, no later than 1st of October 2020.
The artistic partners within Art & Wellbeing – Maribor Art Gallery (Slovenia) and BOZAR (Belgium) – also implement versions of cultural prescriptions in their local contexts.
The cultural prescriptions initiatives are implemented under the european project Art and Well-being, which addresses the relationship between art and well-being, or how the consumption of various forms of art affects mental and physical well-being. The project Art and Well-being is supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
