Prof Scott Thurston and colleagues Dr Joanna Omylinska-Thurston (Salford, Health and Society) and Prof Vicky Karkou (Edge Hill) of the Arts for the Blues team recently presented at the American Psychological Association’s (APA) annual convention held in Washington DC on 2-6 August.
Arts for the Blues was featured twice, amongst the 2000+ presentations in this vast conference, attended by over 10,000 people from all over the world. The team presented a poster entitled: ‘Arts for the Blues: Developing Evidence-Based Intervention with Adults, Children and their Families’ and Prof Karkou spoke as part of a symposium entitled ‘State of the Art in Creative Arts Therapies’. Both the poster session and the symposium were linked to the programme for Division 10: the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.
We came away from Washington impressed by the APA’s Black leaders President Thema S. Bryant and CEO Arthur C. Evans Jr. Their speeches knowingly referenced the Black church traditions of call and response, and we often found ourselves exhorted to turn to our neighbours and say things like: ‘you belong here!’ and ‘I see you!’, which we loved! The leaders’ passionate call to psychologists to get off the sidelines and to engage with social activism was inspiring, and contrasted profoundly with British attitudes in the discipline. Indeed, during the conference we heard of the APA’s success in confronting, and reversing, a decision made by the Florida Department of Education to ban the teaching of psychology in High School if it contained information on sexual orientation or gender identity. As Arthur Evans commented:
“The Florida Department of Education has done the right thing by agreeing that Advanced Placement Psychology may be taught ‘in its entirety,’ without censoring information on sexual orientation and gender identity. This decision puts students and science ahead of politics. Florida students have been taught AP Psychology in an age and developmentally appropriate way for the last 25 years and we are pleased that will continue.”
The scope of the conference was truly amazing and the team attended sessions on subjects ranging from gratitude to God in Islam, to Sufi-inspired embodied movement practices, the use of psychedelics to treat depression and PTSD, and the neuroscience of the perception of emotion in music, to name just a few! Another highlight was a session with the Sesame Street workshop – a partner organisation of the APA with whom they work on matters of child mental health – complete with a visit from Cookie Monster!
As a result, the team (now all APA members) are already planning future attendance at Division 10 and APA events in Texas and Seattle next year. Watch this space for future reports!
