CIMTR Public Lecture: Trauma Informed Arts

Join Nigel Osborne MBE and CIMTR online or in-person for a lecture tracing the history of the diagnosis of trauma, the trauma informed approach and trauma informed arts, with video examples from current work Ukraine and the Middle East.

The present situation in our world requires more trauma care than ever before. The covid pandemic gave rise to a global crisis in mental health among children. Ukrainian children, for example, have suffered multiple traumas: an invasion, the pandemic and now an all-out attack on their personal lives and safety. 70% of Ukrainian children now fulfil DSM-5 criteria for PTSD. The figure for pre-school children is a shocking 95%.

Ukrainian psychiatric and psychosocial services do not have the resources to deal with the massive scale of mental health problems among children, veterans and the society at large. Neither do health services in Lebanon and Syria.

Trauma informed arts is a practical approach to supplementing and supporting psychiatric, psycho-social and psychotherapeutic interventions. The effectiveness of creative arts in helping to treat and support those with trauma is now recognised, and many of the activities normally included in the creative arts, and for which all artists are trained, are recognised as having intrinsic therapeutic value.

Furthermore, the creative arts lend themselves to a trauma-informed approach. The values of safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration and empowerment are essential parts of the creative arts process. Ukraine has large cohorts of creative arts practitioners and educators able and ready to be trained in this work.

Speaker

Nigel Osborne MBE BA BMus (Oxon) DLitt DHumLitt honPhD Dr honoris causa (Kharkiv) FRCM FEIS FRSE, Emeritus Professor of Music and Human Sciences at the University of Edinburgh is a composer, teacher, scientific worker, health worker and aid worker.

His musical works have been performed around the world by major orchestras and opera houses, such as the Vienna Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berlin Symphony, Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House.

He has pioneered methods of using music to support children who are victims of conflict. This approach was developed during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-95), and since then has been implemented widely in the Balkan region, the Caucasus , the Middle East, East Africa, South East Asia and most recently (2022-) in Ukraine – in children’s shelters, hospitals and front line villages. He was awarded the Freedom Prize of the Peace Institute, Sarajevo, for his work for Bosnian children during the siege of the city.

Nigel has worked in the development of music technology for health and disability, including X-System, the first computational model of the musical brain, which formed the basis for the UK National Health Service highly successful Recovery College platform during the pandemic, and is the core technology for a new treatment for rare epilepsies in children. For his contributions to medicine, he has been awarded the Doubleday Medal (2022) of the University of Manchester Faculty of Medicine.

Nigel is currently Principal Investigator for a EU Horizon project, MuseIT, a zero-latency platform for remote co-creation and remote immersive access to museums and other cultural heritage for the disabled.

This event is part of the CIMTR Public Lecture Series 2024-25.