Healing without Words

Life in occupied Palestine can be very stressful and there is shortage of qualified mental and community health care professionals. Few, if any, appropriate support services exist for the people doing this work, despite the stress of their work. To help counter this, Al-Mada has developed a program to both train mental health and educational professional on expressive arts/music therapy and on issues of self-care and stress relief.

 

Music Therapy is Al-Mada’s flagship program. The organization is the first in Palestine to open a center dedicated specifically to Music and Art-based therapy. Additionally, the organization has developed and printed the first music therapy manual in Arabic, so that these ideas and techniques can be made accessible to counselors, social workers, psychologists, educators, and more. The organization introduced this increasingly popular approach to holistic health and mental well-being into Palestinian society and worked extensively with professionals to incorporate these concepts into their daily work.

 

Activities

In 3 months Al-Mada can offer a comprehensive training program for up to 15 professionals (counselors, educators, social workers, etc.) that consists of

  • Intro to Music and Expressive Arts Therapy (30 hours total)
  • Advanced Music Therapy, which allows the trainees to bring in specific examples from their work and develop action plans for appropriate intervention incorporating what they have learned (30 hours)
  • Personal coaching and visits to each trainee in their place of work (30 hours)
  • Provision of resources including the printing and distribution of a music therapy manual and of music therapy toolkit, which include basic instruments
  • Provision of space for the trainings

Al-Mada’s approach to this work is that people learn best for experiencing expressive arts therapy for themselves. Thus, the trainings are very interactive and hands–on. Additionally Al-Mada incorporates advocacy into the process, not only for mental health and socially just community development, but to actively bring creative processes into healing and educational settings in Palestine.