Creative Therapy As Mental Health Prevention

We keep asking why anxiety is rising, why school feels harder, and why so many people hit crisis before they get help. Then Natasha drops a simple idea that changes the lens: as we cut play and creativity out of children’s lives, we should not be surprised by the mental health fallout. Natasha is Head of Therapy and Wellbeing at Mind Apart and a HCPC registered drama therapist, and she explains how creative therapy works in the real world, not as a “nice extra”, but as an accessible route into safety, trust, and change.

We talk about what creative therapy actually looks like, from using metaphor in a parent support session to using music, movement, art, and drama to help someone express what words cannot hold. Natasha shares why these approaches can be especially powerful for neurodivergent people, people with English as a second language, and anyone who has tried traditional talking therapy without success. We also explore the trauma-informed side of the work: the chance to revisit a story, rewrite an ending, add missing support, and rebuild a sense of agency without forcing disclosure before someone is ready.

The conversation goes wider too, into education pressure, the long tail of post-pandemic grief and disconnection, and the practical reality of delivering community mental health support while NHS waiting lists stretch into years. Natasha breaks down the funding and contracting pain points that make “neighbourhood health services” hard to deliver, even when outcomes are strong and demand is obvious.

If you want a grounded, hopeful look at creative therapy, prevention, and what mental health support could be when we value emotional wellbeing, hit play. Subscribe, leave a review, and share the episode with someone who cares about change.

Connect with A Mind Apart: https://amindapart.org.uk/ 

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Welcome to Make an Impact Podcast, where we dive deep into the stories, strategies and solutions that drive real change. I'm Heidi Fisher and I work with organisations on a mission to tackle poverty, reduce health inequalities and create lasting social impact. In each episode I bring you inspiring conversations with change makers, social entrepreneurs and thought leaders who are making a difference. Whether you're looking to boost your impact measurement, learn from innovative projects, or find fresh ideas to transform your work, you're in the right place. Today I'm joined

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Speaker 0:36

by Natasha.

Speaker 1 0:37

I don't think it's a coincidence that as we have cut more and more of play out of children and young people's lives, we've seen a rise in mental health crisis.

Speaker 0:48

Natasha, would you like to introduce yourself, please?

Speaker 1 0:52

Yeah, I'm Natasha. I'm head of therapy and well-being at A Mind Apart, and I'm a HCPC registered drama therapist.

Speaker 0:59

Okay, and could you tell us a little bit about what A Mind Apart does?

Speaker 1 1:04

Yeah, of course. So A Mind Apart will be going 20 years next year. So we're a theatre and education company that offers intervention services for pretty much anyone. But our MO is the people that have tried a lot of other things and it hasn't been successful. And we use creative approaches to be able to support people. So we don't necessarily train actors or creative artists. We use the creative art to support people into the next stage of their lives. So whether it's children that are struggling

What Mind Apart Actually Does

Speaker 1 1:40

to attend school, whether it's adults that are looking for work, whether it's older adults that are looking for friends, we're using the creative interventions to be able to support them. And that includes creative therapy.

Speaker 1:51

Wow, it sounds really interesting. So you say getting creative, right? Start to sweat a little bit because I'm very practical. So what kinds of things does creative therapy involve?

Speaker 1 2:05

So yeah, I understand that getting to sweat a little bit. It might be helpful to know that the creative is sometimes just in the language that I use. Quite often I work with parents that are struggling to support their children. So we offer parent support sessions. And in those, we sit opposite each other, like you may do in a traditional therapy session. There are no creative materials, but the language I'm using, the metaphors I'm using, I'm saying things like it must feel like a big wave is crashing over you. So that's one end of the spectrum of creative therapy, where really it's just the creative bits just for me to help me process what's been said and hold the kind of challenges that are being brought. But on the other end, what creative therapy does is it offers a chance to change the story. And certainly in drama therapy, if something's happened, a traumatic event, so we are trauma-informed in our therapy approaches, we offer a space to redo it, to change it, to change the ending, to add somebody who you wish were there. The same as in art therapy, you can draw a picture of how it could be different, how it could have changed for you. We can offer a space where somebody could go back and talk to themselves when they were much younger. So the creativity is really vast and really wide, and really about the person that is in the session and what they want and what they need. But you can imagine how young people, especially if they have a passion for Billie Eilish, and they come into the therapy space and I play Billie Eilish music and we use Billie Eilish song lyrics to explain how they feel. You can see how that would make them feel way more comfortable and safe and trusting than if they came into the room and I went, How do you feel today? So why isn't all therapy like this? I think quite a lot of therapy is like this, but I think that's the main focus of the way that we are trained as creative therapists is how we use the creativity to be able to support. I do know loads of talking therapists that use journaling and art materials, but I suppose it's not their main focus. They have other modalities and other techniques to be able to support people in the space. My opinion is that the creativity often works in spaces where other things have been tried and it's not been successful. So that might include people who have a developmental disability or English as a second language because we don't have to talk. We can move, we can listen to music together, we can create art, and it's still just as therapy as any other kind of therapy. So that's really where we work in the spaces where other things have been tried and they've not been successful, or when people are on waiting lists for a long time for traditional forms of therapy.

Speaker 4:55

Where other things have been tried, have you found that there are common things that have already been tried, or is it a whole range of different things that people will have potentially tried?

Speaker 1 5:07

It's a whole range sometimes, but I think the common commonality that we're seeing right now is we've got a really good relationship with citizens' advice. So if people are looking for work, perhaps they're on PIP and they may have a disability or a diagnosis or a medical condition that stops them from being able to get work, but they want to be doing something, and that medical condition and disability

When Talking Therapy Is Not Enough

Speaker 1 5:31

is causing mental health concerns, they don't automatically get access to any therapy, they can't pay for therapy, and the traditional forms of therapy might not be able to suit them and their disability or their experience. So we offer a free therapy group every week for adults over the age of 18. That therapy group is a combination of traditional talking therapy, advanced movement psychotherapy, and art therapy. So it really connects into those people that perhaps English is a second language or have autism, so they would find it more difficult to describe exactly what happens in certain scenarios, but the creativity they'd be able to use a painting to be able to describe how they feel perfectly well. And we find that in those groups they tend to have been on waiting lists for NHS therapy for the past three years, that they've tried NHS therapy but they found it inconsistent, or that the spaces that it happened in weren't neurofirming, so that it was too loud, the lights were really bright, they were unable to get there to access the centre. So it's things like that that we're seeing.

Speaker 6:40

Yeah, it sounds amazing. I almost want to come to one of your sessions just to experience it.

Speaker 1 6:46

Well, you're very welcome, and there's often quite a lot of laughter. You say therapy and you think it must be serious all the time, and we're often trying things out, and people are laughing and giggling to themselves. It's quite playful. This is a space where adults can come and do the things that adult life is robbing them of, you know, can come and make a mess, can maybe blow some bubbles, dance to some music if that's what they need. And quite often we're working with parents as well, whose children are perhaps getting some support from the services or from schools, but the parents aren't getting any support at all, so they're often burnt out and really desperate for connection and to be taken care of. And these are the spaces that we do that in.

Speaker 7:28

A more personal question, Sasha, what made you want to get into this work?

Speaker 1 7:35

So I initially trained as an actor, and while I was training as an actor, my brother was diagnosed with autism, and I said, Oh, we'll have to get him into a drama class, like that he will love it. And I couldn't find anyone at that time that would accept him. Everyone said that they couldn't take people with autism criteria, and they wouldn't be able to do that now, but that was the case. So I met Jodie, Jodie Marshall, who was already running a mind

From Actor To Drama Therapist

Speaker 1 8:05

apart for a year, and she'd been using techniques to support those who had committed crimes or were at risk of sexual exploitation, and she'd been creating drama spaces for those. And I've been trying to create drama spaces for neurodivergent children with disabilities. So we sort of came together because we knew that we were using our techniques to support those that currently couldn't access creativity, even though creativity has been proven to extend life, but also to be an effective tool to change. And I've dropped all the ideas of being an actor, really, and I've spent the last 20 years at A Mind Apart. Why I became a therapist, I think the official reason is because we just saw more and more mental health concerns being referred to A Mind Apart, and we realised that what we were doing was therapeutic but not therapy. So I trained as a therapist. But personally, as part of training to be a therapist, you go into therapy, you have to be in therapy for a hundred hours. And I'd started to see that that was something I wanted to know more about how self-reflection could be beneficial in the workspace, and also how using creative therapy might be impactful for me. So it was two of those reasons, really.

Speaker 9:27

Sounds like it's one of those moments where everything aligns and you just know that this is the new route you're gonna take in your life.

Speaker 1 9:35

Yeah, it was exactly that. It was just like a door opened and it fit perfectly into what I was, so it didn't mean that anything had to change A Mind Apart. I was already starting to do that anyway, and it really brought my out my creativity because all through the process we're encouraged to create as well, as we're delivering therapy, we create as artists. So I often paint and draw after the young people have been in, or after the adults have been in, or build things, or sing or move to process the big things that have gone on.

Speaker 10:04

It sounds like the funniest job in the world, in some respects, is seriousness, but also a lot of fun to it.

Speaker 1 10:12

I think someone described it as dealing with the bad things lightly, and I think that's exactly what it is. Sometimes it can be really dark because you spend a lot of time in a young person's or an adult's imaginary world, and sometimes that place is quite dark, but mostly it's a way to kind of bring lightness into the dark, yeah.

Speaker 10:36

More and more young people and adults are having mental health issues. How do you think that we could go about trying to prevent this from happening and more and more young people and adults getting into crisis with their mental health?

Speaker 1 10:51

I don't think it's a coincidence that as we have cut more and more of play out of children and young people's lives, we've seen a rise in mental health crisis. So when Michael Gove decided to cut drama, music, and art from the GCSE

Play, Covid And The Mental Health Rise

Speaker 1 11:12

curriculum, most schools very rarely offer that as a GCSE now, and therefore don't have a full-time art teacher, music teacher, drama teacher in school, so therefore don't really offer it as part of that. They also have cut it from the primary curriculum, so primary school teachers don't get taught how to deliver playful sessions like drama music art. If they have that talent, they do, but it's not a high priority anymore, which is ridiculous because it's scientifically proven that children could do something a hundred times before they change it. But if they did it while they were playing, they could only need to do it ten times. So if they're learning a maths problem, but they do it through play, they will learn it in ten times. But if they did it just by sitting in a classroom and hearing it over and over and over again, it would take a hundred times. So it makes no sense that play has been taken away. But it's also not coincidence that that has caused a rise in mental health concerns. And in countries where there hasn't been a rise in mental health concerns, they're the countries where the children play till seven and then learn gradually until they're 13 and then start learning more formally. As far as adults are concerned, I think that COVID has been a massive traumatic event for the whole of the globe. And I don't think we're dealing with the trauma of the impact of that. And I think that adults are suffering from the lack of community in creative spaces, certainly, but I think that they're we're dealing with as a nation a global traumatic experience.

Speaker 12:50

Yeah, definitely. When I think back to the lockdowns, it's it's not one of my favourite memories of my life, but definitely no.

Speaker 1 12:59

Absolutely not. I mean, the medical side of it even we do, we have no idea what long COVID and the impact of that is. We have no idea of what it was like for children and young people to watch their parents have COVID to have it so bad that they're hospitalised, and we have no idea what the impact of the mass grief that we all experienced. If we didn't know somebody that died, we know somebody who somebody else died. And it was a period of time where death was just vast and nobody has done anything. You know, there's no extra grief therapists out there supporting, instead, we're all realising that certainly for our adults, but but definitely for our children as well, that everything is now different, and yet everything has not changed.

Speaker 13:48

I think that's a good way to describe it. Do you think that education is broken then as a system?

Speaker 1 14:00

What I know for definite is that from speaking to teachers, I literally have just come from a meeting with a group of teachers where a young person that I've been working with for three years is coming up to year six and is just not managing in school. And I am sat in the room and I could hear the teachers worried that he's missing math lessons because they have been led to believe that the most important thing that he leaves primary school with is an understanding of maths, and that baffles me because for me and for this particular child, the most important thing is that he finishes school, and it's not looking like he'll do that if they continue to teach maths and not something else, and let him just be in the school. So I don't think it's broken because I think the staff really understand that what's been given to them and what pressures have been given to them are wrong, and I think that they have the capacity to make a difference, even though the kind of structures that are supporting them are not saying that same message. But I think I think back to when Every Child Matters came out, you know, it's probably about 10 years ago now, and I just think, where's this now? Where's every child matters now? It's not, it's every maths lesson matters. And it always baffles me when I go in and they're like, you know, the kids in crisis or meltdown, another child that I work with, and they're like, nobody's missing this particular science lesson. That's just not a priority for me or for the child right now. And I think thinking about what you discussed about preventative, that's the things that I can see the future of. If children are continued to be forced into classrooms and sitting on chairs for hours and hours on end, what will happen is we'll see a rise in a lack of focus and concentration because they're forced to focus for so long at such a young age that it'll impact the brain.

Speaker 16:04

That sounds very scary. So, what are some of the outcomes and impacts that you've seen from the work that you deliver?

Speaker 1 16:12

So, I think informal is that when somebody works with us, they tend to stay with us for a very, very long time. So, I'll give you an example. A child started working with us when he was five, he's now 16. He just attended the drama classes. But as things become more stressful as he went through COVID, he then started accessing therapy services. As school became more stressful and the

Impact Data And NHS Waiting Lists

Speaker 1 16:42

pressures became putting on his family, his mum also accessed parent support sessions. They both attend our free holiday club that we run. He attends it, and his mum gets to access the show fitness dance class that we get. So it's a real kind of holistic family support, and we've been doing that for nearly 20 years. So we've got loads of generations of siblings, of parents, of the younger children, even young people that have now got their own children that now access our services. So that but that is a massive outcome for me, and it's being able to support a family through all the stages of their life, including now we're now working with grandads and grandmas, and you know, as they grow up, that's a real big impact. But statistically, we follow a Cyclops model, so it assesses from the beginning of the therapeutic intervention to the end of the therapeutic intervention of how they feel on the scale of depression, anxiety, and their own personal goals and outcomes. I aim to be able to go out with my friends more often, to be able to go into more public spaces, to go to a concert, to apply for a job. That might be those are outcomes. So we rate on the scale of that, and we have yet to have a scaling that is below some, and it's almost always 90% increase. So it's 90% of the people that access our services see an increase in overall wellness, overall well-being, and accessing their goals and their outcomes.

Speaker 18:16

So, do you get commissioned by local health services, the local authority or schools?

Speaker 1 18:23

I call it Beg Borrow Steel. So we do have contracts. We have a contract at the moment for supporting children that are leaving care. So they're like 18 upwards, but they're in that awful service section where they stop getting any of their care support, which they've had for 18 years, but they get nothing else. So we have a contract that supports them for at least 12 sessions of therapy, but some of them have had like 20, depending on what they need. We have adoption support fund contracts, and we have an employment support contract which supports young people to get into more creative roles but supports them in a more therapeutic way. So we have some council contracts. We also work with some schools that pay us to come in and offer therapy into the schools. But I would say more often than not, networking from funding. We have uh a whole other army's perspective where we offer corporate companies employment and well-being support, about supporting their attention of their staffs. So we do things like well-being workshops, one-to-one sessions, and quite a lot of that pays for more of our community work that we do. We're always surprised at how difficult it is considering the impact we have.

Speaker 19:39

And the need for it. Yeah. One of the things obviously that's going on within the health service at the moment is this supposed shift from national health service to neighborhood health service and having services and support delivered in neighbourhoods and working with communities more and working with social enterprises and charities and getting them to deliver health services. Do you think that's ever gonna work and function in the way that they desire?

Speaker 1 20:12

Not at the moment, no. What the challenge, well, there's two challenges really. In the case of the employment contract that we have, we've had it for three years, but every year we have to reapply for it. It takes time, it takes energy, and it often takes about three months before we even get paid again. So for three months, we're delivering the service, we're getting outcomes on the service, but we are not getting paid for it because the new contract doesn't start yet. That's just an example of how a small company like us has to manage on three months' worth of work without any payment at all, which is impossible to ask of us. So that model of local support requires the council to tender and for us to contract, but in doing that, it costs a lot of money for us to do. Every hour I spend writing a tender or a contract or chasing an invoice is an hour that I could be spending with a parent that's at crisis with their child. And it that feels like a wasted hour for me. So that's the challenge which has not yet been solved because it's happening right now. We're into our third month of not getting paid for a contract, we're still delivering. It's still happening within the NHS, which is at crisis point as it is. A man I've been working with, I've offered him 24 sessions because he came to me and he said, I have been on the list for trauma therapy for two and a half years, and they're now saying it's going to be another year, and I can't wait another year. So we applied for some funding to be able to offer it in for free. I've offered him 24 sessions so far, and he starts his in theory, he starts his NHS therapy next month, but three years to wait. For somebody with complex mental health concerns is ridiculous. And yes, it's in his neighbourhood, and yes, it's with a local therapist that they've been able to support. But three years is too long to be waiting for that.

Speaker 22:13

Yeah, in that three-year time period, everyone that's waiting, they're gradually or potentially getting worse and worse, aren't they?

Speaker 1 22:21

Making the ability to trust the NHS therapist less and less. The work I've done really is about getting him to potentially trust this person, despite the fact they've been leaving him waiting for three years.

Speaker 22:32

I don't know that there is a solution unless they're paying organisations like yours to deliver this work to reduce the waiting times.

Speaker 1 22:40

There was a bid that came out last year about reducing waiting lists, and it was specifically for that, and it was great, and then that just disappeared, and nobody's ever mentioned it ever again. But I thought that's a really good idea to get a pot of funding and to just fund a bunch of companies, like us to just do 12, 18 sessions with people that are really desperate but waiting. And the beauty of creative therapy doesn't have to be like full-on trauma therapy. If you want, you can bring to the sessions what you need in that moment. If it's simply about being in the space with a trusted professional while you talk about your feelings, and we don't go into the past, that's fine as well. So we are well placed to offer that support, but I only saw it once and then it seems to have disappeared into the ether and never really happened again.

Speaker 23:30

They probably withdrew the contract. If we had the money and resources, what could actually be delivered? Yeah.

Speaker 1 23:37

Me and Jodie go through phases of like, there's some things I can't not deliver, I have to just find the money for because it the people that are accessing it are so desperate, and there is no other option that you know, and I have to consider the risk to the people around them and to the children that I think we have to just do it and then find the money for it. But that's just not right. And I am a quite experienced therapist and I have specialisms, and if I worked anywhere else, that would be prized, but instead it's not in this community work, so it's a real difficult balance, yeah, definitely.

Speaker 24:18

It's a bit like subsidising the NHS, yeah, a bit like that.

Speaker 1 24:24

Or I always think about taking away free school meals and free breakfasts by saving money doing that. All you're doing is putting more money on the children that are then gonna have low nutrition, no vitamin D, and then gonna get prescriptions for vitamin D tablets. You're not saving money at all, you're just putting money somewhere else.

Speaker 24:44

Yeah, definitely. So if you could create an ideal world, what would it look like?

Speaker 1 24:53

This tells you how long I've been working in this industry. I'm really struggling to think big. I think that some therapists are kind of therapy purists, but they think that everyone should have therapy. I don't think that. I think that therapy is what has to happen because we've got a lack of community, and there are other cultures who do this so much better than us that when you feel something, you there's always someone to talk to about it. You can go and talk to an aunt, you can go

The Ideal System And How To Reach Them

Speaker 1 25:22

and talk to a friend, you can go to a church, you can go to an and have those spaces where emotions are regularly spoken about. In here, we're so rushed and so tight that you can't even go and speak to your teacher about feeling sad or scared or angry because they're too busy and they should be the actual places. So it'd be something about community, about supporting community. It'd be something about giving the people that are already doing the work more money to be able to hire people. I know so many therapists that are struggling to get work, really great therapists, that if we had more money and time, we would just snap up and get to work. So something about more money, more time. But I think just moving that emphasis from academic success to emotional well-being would be one of the if I was prime minister for a day. For me, and I think for many of us, yes, we need mathematicians and scientists to help solve loads of problems in the world, but I guarantee those mathematicians and scientists that are solving problems didn't have a traditional education, they won't be the public private school GCS exams, they'll be the ones that were home educated and ended up being a maths. They're the ones that solve the problem. So moving from everyone should pass exams because apparently it sets you up for life, and instead teaching everyone how to manage their emotions as if it's a GCSE would be something that I think is important.

Speaker 26:47

That sounds a positive progression, definitely.

Speaker 1 26:51

I know it does sound a bit hippy-dippy, I understand that as well.

Speaker 26:54

No, it's good, it's nice to hear your thoughts around it. Just before I get you to share where people can get in touch with the mind apart, is there anything else that you wanted to mention that you haven't had the opportunity to so far?

Speaker 1 27:09

I think what we do at Mind Apart is quite hard to describe. So when people say that they haven't heard of us, I understand because we work so vastly, we don't just offer therapy, we don't just offer coaching and mentoring, we don't just offer well-being services. It's really broad. So I suppose my kind of saying is if you have a challenge and you feel like a creative solution might be the way forward, then come to us. Irrelevant if you think we already do it, because we'll make it for you. That's what we've done as we've gone along. People have come and gone, oh, it'd be really great if you did this, and we've got all right, give me three months and I'll do it. So please do. We are the ones that creatively solve problems and we've been doing it for 20 years and we'll continue to do it. So if you're not sure if we deliver it, come to us. If not, if it's for the sake of you and whoever else that needs it, we'll make it work.

Speaker 28:00

Yeah, I've noticed through the conversation today that there's so many different groups of young people and adults that you're working with. It's pretty much if you feel like you need help, get in touch pretty much because you're gonna be seen, whatever your situation.

Speaker 1 28:16

Our youngest that we support right now is four, our oldest is 76, and everyone in between.

Speaker 28:24

Where can people get in touch with you? What are your socials? Uh different.

Speaker 1 28:28

So if you just put A Mind Apart into any social media, we have Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, uh, LinkedIn. We all have our separate LinkedIn pages as well as A Mind Apart has its own LinkedIn. I think if you're a Facebooker, that's the place that we're most active on, but we're working hard on Instagram and TikTok right now. And then for me personally, I'm really active on LinkedIn, so please check us out on those spaces. And I do actually have spaces for therapy clients coming up and one space for supervision because I'm supervision qualified as well.

Speaker 29:05

Excellent. So loads of places where to find out more about A Mind Apart and get in touch with Natasha or Jodie. It's been really interesting talking to you and finding out more about the creative therapy and the different workshops and wellness and well-being stuff you do. It's definitely opened my eyes to what it actually is. So thank you for sharing that with me today. You're welcome. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Make an Impact Podcast. I hope you found today's conversation as inspiring and thought-provoking as I did. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with others who want to create positive change. You can connect with me on LinkedIn and learn more about my work at makeanimpact.cic.co.uk. Until next time, let's keep making an impact in the world.