Nun Examines Strokes to Help Folks

MIAMI _ How a patient draws the thickness of a tree trunk, the lines in a bridge and the characters in a circus are clues Sister Mary Kuester uses to understand their thoughts and emotions.

As an art therapist at Miami’s Mercy Hospital, Kuester helps psychiatric patients explore hidden feelings through pictures. Twice a day, five days a week, she holds sessions where she directs a group of patients to draw a certain image _ like a tree _ in half an hour and then explain their drawings to each other. Analysis with the group and Kuester helps patients learn about their subconscious thoughts. Those observations also can help validate doctors’ diagnoses and give additional insight that can aid patients’ recovery, Kuester said.

“Art therapy, in itself, does not cure anyone,” said Kuester, a nun with the Sisters of St. Joseph. “It helps look at some things that have not been verbalized to the doctors.”

Art therapy was developed after World War II to help children cope with war trauma. Since then, it has been adopted by hospitals, schools and clinics.

Kuester said she has had a longtime interest in art and the study of mental illness. She earned a bachelor’s degree in art in 1976 from College Misericordia in Dallas, Pa. During her one-year stint at a Deland, Fla., nursing home, she became inspired to join the Sisters of St. Joseph. Over the next 14 years, she taught art and religion classes to kindergartners through eighth graders at Florida schools in St. Augustine, Little Havana, Little Haiti and Orlando.

At St. Charles Borromeo School in Orlando, Kuester said she started “seeing things in the children’s art and making connections with their emotional states and wanted to learn how to interpret the art.” She asked her sister congregation for funds to get a master’s in art therapy. In 1997, she received her degree from Marywood University in Scranton, Pa. Then a sister who was Mercy’s CEO brought Kuester to Miami to set up the hospital’s art therapy program.

Kuester said her reward as an art therapist comes from “seeing the patients take hold of their treatment, seeing the `Aha!’ moment.”

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(c) 2007, The Miami Herald.

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PHOTO (from MCT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): arttherapy

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