4 ArTS - International Encounter for Arts Therapies Students

Welcome to 4 ArTS!

 
4ArTS is an international gathering of around eighty arts therapies students - art therapy, dance movement psychotherapy, music therapy, dramatherapy - from all over the world for an intensive three to four-day conference. This conference takes place once a year in a different country and is organized "by students for students". The conference offers a well-balanced mixture of experiential workshops run by students and lectures given by established professionals. As arts therapies students we strongly believe in the value of sharing our experiences and engaging in constructive debates about the educational and therapeutic significance of these experiences. It was this belief that lead to the creation of 4ArTS in 2005.

This website has been created to serve as an international and interdisciplinary community for all arts therapies students to build a network, exchange, debate and close the gap between being a student and turning a professional. Help us promote an international arts therapies culture!

We hope you enjoy the website!

Hello!

I am Ira van Gansewinkel, 25 years old and I live in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
I`ve been asked to write a blog about my experiences as a `new born` Dramatherapist.
In this first blog I will tell you a bit in general where I work and with what kind of target groups I work with.

Last June I graduated as a Dramatherapist at the Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 2 days before my graduation I had a job interview and 5 weeks later I was told that I got the job! Since September 2011 I am working at the LVR-Klinik Bedburg-Hau in Germany. I´ve started working parttime, but after a short period they hired me for fulltime, so from January 2012 I started working fulltime.
I am working with many different target groups, such as the normal psychiatry (the clients there have disorders like anxiety, ocd (obsessive compulsive disorder) depression, borderline etc), the depression department, the elderly psychiatry and the forensic psychiatry.
2 years ago I also did my placement in the clinic here, and because of that I was allready used to the way of working here. As a employee, you have to be real independent and flexibel because it`s a really big clinic, with about 100 houses spread around in a wooded environment. During my placement I worked especially with drugaddicts who were here for rehab, clients with a dual diagnosis (a mental disorder and an addiction) and forensic clients who commited their crime on base of their addiction. During that placement I realised that I really like working with diverse people who ask a lot of attention and that I like to be challenged in my work. These two things I also see back in my work these days. Because I work with many different target groups, I am challenged every day to adjust my therapeutic attitude and to find out what I can offer everyone of them.
Nowadays I have 11 group therapies and 2 individual therapies during the week. I feel that this is a right number for me, because everyday I have 2 or 3 therapies and while it often feels a bit busy, I like being busy more than that I spend the whole day at the office!

So, this was a short introduction of me and my work. I would like to ask you, if you read this blog, if you can comment on it and tell me what kind of information you would like to have from me, about what kind of things you want to hear about from a `new born` Dramatherapist.

Greets,
Ira