INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ART AND HEALTH
Panel 1: Arts, Neuroscience, and Thinking Strategies
Cognitive Processes, Emotions, and the Brain-Friendly Museum
Annalisa Banzi (Italy), CESPEB – University of Milano-Bicocca
Knowledge about cognitive processes (perception, memory, learning, etc.) and emotions is fundamental in the design of temporary exhibitions, educational activities, museums labels, etc. The application of the continuing discoveries provided by psychology and neuroscience to the museum context can help to offer more meaningful visitor experiences.
Even the definition of the museum should include taking care of the needs of our brain. For this reason, the concept of the brain-friendly museum (BFM) has been developed. What is it? It is an institution based upon the respect of human beings' cognitive processes and emotions as well as on the protection, preservation, dissemination, and appreciation of our tangible and intangible heritage for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment. The BFM approach requires the systematic collaboration across domains and the collection of scientific evidence on the influence of cognitive processes and emotions when triggered in museums.
Art Therapy, Neuroscience, and Trauma
Juliet L. King (USA), The George Washington University
Recent years have seen a growing emphasis on how neuroscience informs culture, arts, and health, generating enthusiasm from policymakers, funding agencies, and advocacy groups. Art therapy is a medical and healthcare profession that has a legally defensible scope of practice, educational competencies, code of ethics, and is supported by evidence-based research. Advances in knowledge about the functions of the brain, body, and nervous system extends to art therapy and informs theory, practice strategies, and research methods. Trauma is a collective phenomenon, and a contemporary understanding of neurobiology allows for the use of evidence and principles to underscore and illuminate the best approaches to treatment. This presentation will review the unique role of art therapy to address trauma sequelae across populations and demonstrate how partnerships between creative arts therapists and neuroscientists are a powerful source that leads to innovation and scientific breakthrough in our troubled times.
Moderator: Alexandre Castro Caldas (Portugal), National Council for Health Sciences, Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Juliet L. King
Juliet L. King (PhDc), ATR-BC, LPC, LMHC is an Associate Professor of Art Therapy at The George Washington University and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Neurology at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Juliet developed and implemented the graduate art therapy program at Herron School of Art & Design-IUPUI, leading to over 30 graduate student internships in the Indianapolis community and across the state. She also developed and oversees the Art Therapy in Neuroscience and Medicine program at the IU Neuroscience Center. Professor King's research focuses on integrating art therapy and neuroscience, particularly in the areas of neuroaesthetics and contemporary neuroimaging. Currently pursuing a PhD in Translational Health Sciences, her dissertation is the development of a neuroscience-informed art therapy toolkit for the treatment of trauma. In 2016, Juliet authored and edited the book Art Therapy, Neuroscience and Trauma: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives, and is currently working on the second edition, set to be published in early 2024.
Annalisa Banzi
Researcher at CESPEB-University of Milano-Bicocca. Founder and coordinator of the ASBA project. She earned a Ph.D. in psychology applied to museum studies and is an art historian and researcher at CESPEB-University of Milano-Bicocca (Milan, Italy). She also teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata: Psychology of Perception, Psychology of Cultural Consumption, Cultural Sociology, and Semiology of the Body. She has an interdisciplinary specialisation in museum studies, psychology, and neuroscience which aaims atimproving the dissemination of museum contents and developing the mental wellbeing and satisfaction of visitors. She is the author of The Brain-friendly Museum. Using psychology and neuroscience to improve the visitors experience (Routledge, 2023). She is the author and co-authors of several papers and book chapters.
Alexandre Castro Caldas
Currently Director of the Institute of Health Sciences at the Portuguese Catholic University, was until February 2004 Full Professor of Neurology at the Faculty of Medicine in Lisbon and Director of the Neurology Service at the Santa Maria Hospital in Lisbon.
His publications include two textbooks for students, The Inheritance of Franz Joseph Gall and Journey to the Brain and some of its Competences, and more than 100 articles in international journals such as Brain, Neurology, NeuroImage, Journal of Cognitive Neurosciences, JINS, and numerous chapters in national and international books. His main scientific interests are related to Cognitive Neurosciences and Movement disorders.
Conference: Art in Medical Education
Improvement of human behaviour in medical teachers through interdisciplinarity in sciences
Isis Betancourt Torres (Cuba), University of Medical Sciences of Havana (UCMH)
The solutions to the current problems of society lead to the articulation of disciplines, specialties and various areas of the vast existing knowledge, which in this study focuses on a topic related to the field of health, by evaluating the interdisciplinarity of history, art and medicine to the improvement of human behaviour in teachers of internal medicine and paediatrics in a school of the Medical University of Havana. The main problems, potentialities and modifications were identified after applied talks, exchanges of experiences, conferences, debates and other alternatives of the Theory of Advanced Education. The benefits of the disciplines of history, literature, painting, sculpture, music, architecture, internal medicine and paediatrics were enhanced in the history-art-medicine nexus. The influence of these on the motivation, comprehensiveness, teaching and professional performance and a transformation that contributed to the improvement of the human behaviour of these Cuban health professionals was evident.
Moderator: Ana Sofia Torres Baptista, Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP)
Isis Betancourt Torres
Internal Medicine specialist. Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Medical Sciences of Havana UCM H. Master in Atherosclerosis. Founding Director of the National Research Group and Project in History, Art and Medicine HistArtMed. Secretary of the Cuban Society of Internal Medicine SOCUMI. Member of the national advisory and technical commission for the prevention of arterial hypertension. Member of the Ibero-American Forum of Medical Education FIAEM. Specialist and announcer of the weekly sections HistArtMed in the Hola Habana Magazine of Canal Habana and in the Magazine De Mañana of the Cuban station Radio Taino. President of the Organizing Committee of the HistArtMed International Congress. Author of several books and publications in specialized magazines. Full Member of the Cuban Society of Internal Medicine SOCUMI. Foreign Corresponding Member of the Uruguayan Society of Internal Medicine. Full member of SOLAMI, ISIM, FIMI, AMICAC, FIAEM, SOLAT and the Society of Cuban Health Educators.
Ana Baptista Torres
Ana Baptista Torres is a family doctor based in Porto and also a CINTESIS-integrated researcher and invited professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto. With a special interest in communication, health literacy and decision-making and being passionate about art, Sofia has developed a first-of-its-kind course for health professionals at the University of Porto: "To observe: from arts to clinics". After being the CNN Portugal medical correspondent for more than a year, she now hosts a health podcast on the radio: "M80 Mala Médica".
Panel 2: The Role and the Experience of Museums Towards Healing
Museums & Art Psychotherapy. Looking at the example of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens | EMΣΤ
Elisabeth Ioannides (Greece), National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (ΕΜΣΤ)
Over the past twenty years, there has been a major increase in research into the effects of the arts on health and well-being, alongside developments in practice and policy activities in different countries. The cultural heritage sector, and in particular the museum field, is among the many organizations that provide a platform for expression through the arts and can be effective in improving the physical, psychological, social and mental wellbeing of individuals. In this presentation we will focus on one way in which the arts and museums can bring about personal change, emotional and mental growth. We will explain what art psychotherapy is, how and why it could be practiced in museums. We will then look at the example of the art psychotherapy program “Exploring the Museum’s Images – Exploring my Image” that is realized at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens | EMΣΤ, the sole public institution in Greece constantly supporting art psychotherapeutic practice. She has a broad teaching and mentoring experience. Her research work has a special focus on museum learning, art psychotherapy, health and well-being, inclusivity and on the various ways that culture can contribute to the efficiency of education and health systems. Her articles are on academia.edu.
The Art Hive of the MMFA: Art Therapy, 3rd Spaces, and Creative Health
Stephen Legari (Canada), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
For over 20 years, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has been innovating in specialized programming that addresses the well-being of its visitors. Innumerable clinical and community partnerships have seen a flourishing of research, program development, and institutional change. As part of its integrated art therapy program, the MMFA boasts a community open studio called the Art Hive which sees thousands of participants engage in non-directed art making and community building within the walls of the museum every year. This presentation will report briefly on the MMFA's broader therapeutic work, including art therapy groups, social prescribing, training art therapists, and research, while positioning the Art Hive within the museum's mandate and strategic plan. Both the theory and practice of a museum-based community art studio will be discussed as well as the bi-directional influence of this cost-effective programming.
Moderator: Joana Simões Henriques (Portugal), MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology
Elisabeth Ioannides
Elisabeth Ioannides is an education curator and art psychotherapist at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens | ΕΜΣΤ.
She is a member of ICOM, AICA, the British, American, Canadian and Greek Association of Art Therapists, the European Association for Psychotherapy (EAP), and the European Federation of Art Therapy (EFAT) (member of the Research Committee and coordinator of the SIG “Art psychotherapy in museums”). She was Vice-President of the Board of the Association of Greek Expressive Therapists & Jungian Coaching (2020-2022).
At ΕΜΣΤ, since 2017, with A. Pantagoutsou, she has been running the art psychotherapy group “Exploring the Museum’s Images – Exploring My Image”.
She has been on Advisory Committees of the Ministry of Culture and Sports for the examination of proposals for grants and/or Sponsorships, events and programs that promote accessibility for people with disabilities in culture. In 2021 & 2023 she was nominee for the Greek International Women’s Awards in the field of Art and Culture.
Stephen Legari
Stephen Legari has a master's degree in creative arts therapies from Concordia University and a master's degree in couple and family therapy from McGill University, where he trained in Couple Therapy for Complex Trauma.He has worked extensively with individuals, groups, couples and families in clinical and non-clinical settings.Since 2017, Stephen has been in charge of the art therapy programme at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where he has developed specialised therapy programmes for groups, supervised master's students and contributed to numerous publications on the arts in health.
Joana Simões Henriques
Joana Simões Henriques is graduated in Social and Cultural Communication from Catholic University of Portugal, with a specialization in Cultural Communication from LUMSA – Libera Università Maria Ss. Assunta, Rome, Italy – and has a master's degree in Cultural Management from ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon.
She has collaborated with the departments of curatorship and collection management and the department of artistic education of CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; with the board of Paulo Amaro Contemporary Art Gallery; and, since 2010, she has been collaborating with EDP Foundation in the areas of curatorship and educational programming in museums, focusing, from 2016, on the educational programming and public programs of the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), Lisbon. She has also published several texts on contemporary art and cultural programming. She is a member of the Art, Museums and Digital Cultures cluster of IHA / FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She has an interest in research in the field of museums, contemporary art and architecture, cultural mediation and culture as a tool for social and human development, topics on which she has programmed several projects and conferences.
Keynote: The Science of Beauty
Semir Zeki (United Kingdom), University College London
The experience of beauty, whether derived from sensory sources such as visual art or music, from moral sources or from highly cognitive ones such as mathematics, correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain, located in the frontal lobe, which is also the site that is active during the experience of pleasure and reward. Moreover the intensity of activity there is proportional to the intensity of the beauty experienced. These findings raise important questions not only about the role and uses of beauty in our daily lives but, as Plato and the physicist Paul Dirac accurately predicted, also in our efforts to understand the structure of the Universe, through the experienced beauty of mathematical formulations that chart its structure.
Moderator: Luís Duarte Maderia (Portugal), Portuguese Society of Psychiatry and Mental Health
Semir Zeki
Semir Zeki holds the Chair of Neuroesthetics at University College London, having previously held the Chair of Neurobiology there. He has specialized in studying the organization of the visual brain and, more recently, has expanded his work to study the neural mechanisms that are engaged during aesthetic and allied experiences, such as those of beauty, desire and love. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Member of the American Philosophical Society. He has written three books and has given numerous lectures in universities and art galleries worldwide. He has also conducted public discussions on art and the brain with eminent artists, including Balthus (in France), Michelangelo Pistoletto (Italy) and Tatsuo Miyajima (Japan), among others.
Luís Duarte Madeira
Luís Madeira develops his career in four synchronous areas. He is a psychiatrist graduated in Medicine from the University of Lisbon in 2008 and is currently the coordinator of the Department of Psychiatry at Hospital CUF Descobertas and President-Elect of the Portuguese Society of Psychiatry and Mental Health. He holds a master's degree in Philosophy from the University of Central Lancashire and a PhD in Medicine - Philosophy of Psychiatry. He is an Assistant Professor of Ethics and Medical Deontology and Psychiatry Luís Duarte at the Lisbon School of Medicine of the University of Lisbon. He is also a Psychotherapist with the Portuguese Society of Client-Centred Psychotherapy and Person-Centred Approach. He has presented more than one hundred national and international communications and has his name in 40 publications.
Panel 3: Healing Environment in the Hospital
The Third Carer – Human-centric Hospital Design and its Role in Contemporary Culture
Ab Rogers (United Kingdom), Ab Rogers Design
This talk proposes the notion of design as a 'third carer' - where the architecture of the hospital tends to its users, actively supporting a patient's medical team (first carers) and family and friends (second carers), facilitating nurturing interactions and anticipating the needs of its occupants. We will explore its potential to create inclusive clinical spaces that are adaptable, sensorially engaging, domestic in scale, colour and tactility, well-lit, acoustically controlled and permeable to the natural world.
We will illustrate our vision for the hospital of the future, an approach first presented in our award-winning submission to the 2021 Wolfson Economics Prize and further developed through the work of DRU+, a design research collective dedicated to innovative solutions in healthcare. We will examine its social, economic and political impact on its internal and external neighbourhoods to better understand its unique ecology and enable it to best serve its citizens.
The Experience of Manchester University: Lime Arts and Wellbeing Centre
Dawn Prescott (United Kingdom), Manchester NHS Foundation Trust
As one of the largest acute Trusts in the UK, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) employs over 28,000 staff and provides care for approximately 750,000 people per year.
Founded in 1973, Lime is MFT’s multi award-winning Arts and Health programme that boasts a portfolio of projects spanning 50 years making it the oldest, continually producing, hospital-based Arts and Health team in the UK. Recognised globally for excellence, Lime enables over 20,000 staff, patients and carers each year direct access to the arts in all their vibrancy.
The Lime Arts and Wellbeing Centre opened in 2021 and presents a global landmark for culture and wellbeing in healthcare as the first purpose-built artist and printmaking studio in a hospital setting, in the UK. Lime’s Director Dawn Prescott will share examples of best practice to demonstrate how Lime’s visionary arts programme continues to innovate and embed arts into healthcare systems across Manchester.
Moderator: Luís Campos (Portugal), Portuguese Council for Health and Environment, (CPSA), European Federation of Internal Medicine (EFIM)
Ab Rogers
Ab Rogers is a designer and founder of Ab Rogers Design (ARD), a design and architecture studio founded in 2004 and now co-directed with architect Ernesto Bartolini.
With a specific focus on caring spaces, sustainability and inside-out design, the studio works internationally across the health, cultural, hospitality and residential sectors, creating engaging environments that bring narrative and purpose into the everyday, through sensual colour, tactile materiality and rigorous detailing. In 2021, the studio won the Wolfson Economics Prize with its design for the hospital of the future.
www.abrogers.com
Dawn Prescott
Dawn Prescott has a professional background spanning 20 years working in arts and health. She currently works as the Arts Programme Director at Lime based at Manchester NHS Foundation Trust (MFT). Now in its 50th year, Lime is an award-winning arts and health organisation with international recognition. Dawn is responsible for implementing and sustaining a multi-stranded art and music programme across MFT that provides high quality creative experiences to over 20,000 NHS patients, staff and visitors every year. In 2021 Dawn secured funding to open the Lime Arts and Wellbeing Centre, the first dedicated fully facilitated arts studio in a hospital setting in the UK which presents a global landmark for culture and wellbeing in healthcare at MFT. Dawn has co-authored and edited a series of arts and health reports, publications and articles. She is also a practicing visual artist and exhibited her works in the UK + Europe.
Luís Campos
President of the Portuguese Council for Health and Environment, advisor of the General Directorate of Health, chairman of the Quality of Care and Professional Issues Working Group of the European Federation of Internal Medicine (EFIM), and coordinator of Internal Medicine at CUF Belem Clinic.
At the same time, Luís Campos has been developing artistic activity since 1981. He has held 23 individual exhibitions and participated in 52 collective exhibitions in Portugal and abroad. He is represented in the collections of the PLMJ Foundation, António Cachola, Museo Extremeño e IberoAmericano de Arte Contemporaneo (MEIAC) in Badajoz, Museu da Imagem in Braga, Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) and the Gulbenkian Foundation, among others. In 2002, he received the Medal of the Conseil Général des Hauts-de-Seine at the Salon d`Art Contemporain de Montrouge. Luís Campos was the one who stimulated the transformation of Hospital de São Francisco Xavier into Hospital das Artes, in 2014.
Panel 4: The Role of the Arts in Improving Health
Building Movement and Music into Museum Practice
Filipa Pereira-Stubbs (United Kingdom), artist and teacher
Ever since early childhood I have had a great love for museums & galleries. Regardless of shape and size, they offer opportunity for wonder & heightened imagination, a reaching to something vital in life that also gives huge pleasure. They are places to step in close to creativity & curiosity, inspiration and beauty. As a dance artist a main weave of my work is to bring movement and music into museum spaces through inclusive, integrated workshops and programmes, offering people from all walks of life ways to feel connected, feel well, and feel part of the flow of human cultural endeavour.
How do we bring ordinary folk and every day movement together to create safe and protected spaces in which to meaningfully explore the world of art? At the Fitzwilliam Museum we have interwoven a practice of embodied and slow looking into museum education work to invite participants to encounter and enjoy art differently, experiencing wellness, joy and connection.
Listening to familiar music as a therapeutic experience
Carina Freitas (Portugal), University of Madeira
Familiar music is defined as music we know or music to which we have been previously exposed. First, I will show images of the processing of listening to familiar music, namely the most active brain areas (those associated with memory processing and premotor area) and compare them with the brain areas activated by unfamiliar music. Subsequently, I will specify the therapeutic applications (conventional and digital) of listening to familiar music in psychiatric, neurological and neurodevelopmental diseases. I will conclude by addressing the relevance of the use of music as a tool for humanizing the hospital environment
Moderator: Luiza Teixeira de Freitas (Portugal), Operação Nariz Vermelho
Filipa Pereira-Stubbs
Filipa Pereira-Stubbs is a Cambridgeshire based dance artist, dance teacher, and creative practitioner with thirty years of experience in dance & health and in community arts. Filipa devises and delivers dance & health programmes, in the community, in clinical settings, in museums and galleries, and outdoors in Nature. Her core projects include Dance for Health at Cambridge University Hospitals and Dance at the Museum at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University Museums. She is a long standing and founding member of the arts collective Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination (CCI).
Her work is built on somatic practices and the practice of improvisation & imagination, and she is determinedly passionate about bridging cultural, age and health differences through projects that build and maintain inclusivity and integration through the arts. Her work in the field of medicine creates bridges between subjective, phenomenological perspectives of the body and normative approaches to medicine and health. Throughout her different projects she enables participants to build compassionate and healthier relationships with themselves, with their communities and with nature.
Bsc Sociology, MA DMT, Churchill Fellow 2014
Carina Freitas
Carina Freitas is a child psychiatrist working at Madeira Private Hospital.
She holds a PhD in Neurosciences from the University of Toronto, Canada, and is a Guest Assistant Professor at the Integrated Master's Degree in Medicine at the Faculty of Life Sciences of the University of Madeira and one of the coordinators of the Graduate Program in Music Neurosciences at the Institute of Health Sciences of the Catholic University of Portugal, a degree she helped create in 2020.
Alongside her career in medicine, she has developed her taste and musical skills at the Madeira Conservatory of Music, and released her album “Alchemy” of original compositions in 2006. She is also a music therapist and was a collaborator of the Regional Health Service of the Autonomous Region of Madeira SESARAM (until 2022) in the "Arts in Health" project.
Luiza Teixeira de Freitas
Luiza Teixeira de Freitas is an independent art curator. Among the several projects in which she is involved, her curatorial and consulting work with private collections is of particular note, along with her active work with independent publications and artist books, having launched her own publisher, Taffimai, in 2018. Although based in Portugal, she frequently works with projects in São Paulo, New York, London, Los Angeles and the Middle East, among others. She is a strategy consultant for Delfina Foundation in London and is on the Board of Bidoun.
In the health sector, Luiza has been president of Operação Nariz Vermelho since January 2020, a non-profit association whose mission is to bring joy to hospitalized children, their families and companions, and hospital professionals. In 2022, she completed a postgraduate course in Paediatric Palliative Care, an area she has been developing and following closely. She is part of the communication group of the Portuguese Association of Palliative Care and consults on various projects involving art and health.
Panel 5: Art and Mental Disorders
Art Therapy, Clinical Processes in the Art Sector
Elsa Scanio*(Argentina), Hospital Morón Buenos Aires
Language: Spanish/English
Therapeutic modality whose itinerary includes travelling through assembled artistic languages. Reflections on the role of art in individual and group clinical processes. A vision on interpreters and interpretations that invites us to consider the value of the psychology of representation in artherapy. Role of the art therapist in a clinic that rescues the process over the product, drawing by drawing over drawing, writing by writing over writing, art by artisan over art. Art therapeutic experiences with patients from a public hospital in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Safety, Creativity and Mental Health
Rachel Massey (United Kingdom), Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance
How can we co-create safe spaces with people experiencing mental ill health? Rachel will consider the role of participants, commissioners, funders, project managers, creative practitioners and support workers in ensuring that projects do no harm, ensure safety and manage risk. She will introduce Culture Health and Wellbeing Alliance’s new Quality Framework for Creative Health, which addresses eight key principles for good creative health projects, including the principle of Safe. She will highlight some of the topics being raised by CHWA members across the UK and present examples of projects that take into consideration the safety of people and planet.
Moderator: Maria Luísa Figueira (Portugal), Lisbon School of Medicine
Elsa Scanio
Clinical psychologist, staff professional, competitive at the Municipal Hospital of Morón, 1980, Buenos Aires, Argentina. In said institution, she was Coordinator of the Clinical Psychopedagogy team of the Mental Health Service. Creator of the Art and Clinic Team since 1994. Clinical and Teaching Director of the Art Therapy Internship at said Hospital. Coordinator of the Art Therapy clinical device for the SUMS Morón Deinstitutionalization Program with Open Door outpatients. Member of the Directorate of the Centre for Learning and Research in Clinical Psychopedagogy, Prevention Area, Hospital Posadas (1984-1990). Guest art therapist at the Art Therapy Centre, Day Hospital, Ospedale della Azzienda Sanitaria in Florence, Italy (1995-1996). Art therapist invited by the ATTEP CEFFAT in Paris in 1996. Regular visiting professor of the Integrative Master's Degree in Art Therapy, University of Girona, Spain (2016-2023). Director of the ZAC Project "Zone of Art and Clinic", a space dedicated to the assistance, exploration and follow-up of group clinical processes in Art Therapy. Member of the Clinical group for the "Workshop of the senses" (itinerant space).
Rachel Massey
Rachel has over 25 years’ experience of working in Creative Health as an artist, project coordinator and consultant. She works for CHWA as the North Regional Lead and runs Other Ways to Walk, which she founded in 2016 to help people connect with nature using creative & mindful approaches. This includes supporting people referred by health and social care services via Nature Fix online membership programme and Green Wellbeing Courses.
As Art and Wellbeing Coordinator at Yorkshire Sculpture Park she led a four-year programme in partnership with NHS coproducing creative activities with people living with mental ill health. Following this she coordinated a county-wide creative health programme for Arts Derbyshire. She also worked for six months in the health sector as a manager at Live Well Wakefield, a large-scale social prescribing programme.
Rachel is a qualified Mindfulness Instructor, Mental Health First Aider, Walking for Health Leader and Forest Bathing Guide.
Maria Luísa Figueira
Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Mental Health. She took her doctorate at the Lisbon School of Medicine of the University of Lisbon with a thesis entitled “Interpersonal relationships in schizophrenia. An experimental study”. She was director of the Psychiatry Service of North Lisbon Hospital Centre (Hospital de Santa Maria) from 2003 until her Retirement in January 2014. She was the President of the Portuguese Society of Psychiatry in the three-year period 2013-1015. She was also the president of the Specialty College of Psychiatry for 6 years. She has been invited as a lecturer at numerous national and international congresses. She has published more than 200 articles in national and international journals. In 2010 she received a lifetime achievement award in Budapest – “European Bipolar Forum Achievement Award”.
One of her interests is the relationship between musical creativity and affective disorders, especially bipolar ones. Among her several topics of research are the work of Schumann, Rossini, and Puccini. In recent years, she has also worked in the area of Phenomenology and Epistemology of Psychiatry in its interface with neurosciences
Keynote: The Population Health Benefits of Arts and Cultural Engagement
Daisy Fancourt* (United Kingdom), World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Arts & Health, University College London
This talk will present findings from analyses of international cohort studies, showing the long-term public health impact of arts and cultural engagement around the world. It will discuss the mechanisms behind these effects as well as the challenges in ensuring equality of access and consider how we could develop arts and cultural policy in order to maximise benefits for global health and wellbeing.
Moderator: Catarina Alvarez (Portugal), Associação Alzheimer Portugal
Daisy Fancourt
Dr. Daisy Fancourt is Professor of Psychobiology & Epidemiology at University College London and Head of the Social Biobehavioural Research Group. Her research focuses on the effects of social factors on health, including loneliness, social isolation, social & community assets, arts and cultural engagement, and social prescribing. She is Director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre on Arts and Health, a Technical Advisor to the WHO, an Expert Scientific Adviser to UK Government, a BBC New Generation Thinker, and a World Economic Forum Global Shaper.
Catarina Alvarez
She graduated in Psychology in 2009 and completed her master's degree in Neuropsychology at Lusófona University of Humanities and Technologies in 2011. She is a full member of the Portuguese Psychological Association with specialization in Clinical and Health Psychology and an advanced specialization in Psychogerontology. She is currently in training at the Portuguese Society for Existential Psychotherapy.
She also holds a degree in Law from Catholic University of Portugal since 1996. Before dedicating herself to Psychology, she developed her professional activity in the legal area and in the business sector, within the context of project coordination. Since October 2012 she has been working at Alzheimer Portugal. Currently, she is responsible for the association's Institutional Relations, developing activities related to the creation of partnerships and public advocacy work.
She has several years of experience as an educator in the areas of Aging, Dementia, Informal Caregivers and related topics, having participated, as a speaker, in numerous projects and technical-scientific events in these areas. For the last ten years, she has been providing Psychology services at a Residential Structure for the Elderly in Lisbon. She currently carries out her clinical activity in a private practice.