Occupational Therapy – Art Therapy – Sensory Stimulation

Creative therapies give the child the chance to express himself freely, in a secure environment, without having the feeling of pressure to seek appropriate words for the things he experiences. The creative therapies use images through painting, modeling, collage, sand, sound to better understand the inner and outer world.

It is a child-centered approach, on his needs and wishes, taking into account the context in which the child lives.

The sensory integration disorders are common in children with learning disabilities and neurological disorders such as autism.

The goals of these therapies are:

• Improvement of fine and coarse motility
• Develop independent living skills
• Develop play skills (to have fun while playing with another child)
• Develop skills to open up emotionally and to express their own feelings and wishes
• Reduce stress and anxiety (specific for those with TSA especially)
• Learn the basics of communication with another person
• Establish a connection with another person
• Reducing side effects of sensory integration dysfunction, including some stereotypes
• Learning how to build a game, to create a story etc discovering abilities and limits

The environment is specially arranged for the child to feel safe and to allow him to express himself freely, to experiment various situations and emotions, looking and finding adequate solutions, all these things improving child’s self-image, self-confidence and his ability to become an active part of the society.

During therapy, games, educational and instructive activities are carried on. The purpose of all these activities is the development of thinking, language, networking, socializing, while using the effects and benefits of sensations and emotions integration.

An important place in the approach of this therapy, especially when it involves working with children with ASD, is held by the fine and coarse motility activities organized to respond to child’s sensorial needs.

Most of the times, children with sensorial integration dysfunction have problems related to tactile, smell, hearing, taste and/or visual sense. Many times, these are accompanied by movement, coordination, body space awareness difficulties.

Thus, these children can be extremely sensitive to certain textiles, sounds, smells, tastes, certain clothes, perfumes, foods, noises that can cause discomfort.

Equally, there can be children at the opposite side when they don’t feel pain or enjoy pleasure when having some sensations neurotypical children reject, such as: intense smells or cold, unpleasant tastes etc.

When dealing with a sensorial integration dysfunction, the brain seems incapable to separate the stimuli and the background, to determine what is really important. This leads most of the times to overstimulation, sensory information overload.

Sensory integration therapy is useful to children with learning difficulties (and with different disabilities, especially with ASD), helping them to process the information from various sensory channels. Besides stimulating the visual, hearing, taste, smell, vestibular senses, this therapy includes the stimulation of the tactile and proprioceptive senses to improve balance and motor development.

The child learns in a pleasing and fun environment about and how to manage his own body and the surroundings. The therapist offers challenging tasks that will promote learning, without overloading the child. Games, motility and sensorial activities are carried on to encourage initiative, finding a solution, expressing a wish, body awareness.

A very important principle is promoting independence, helping the child to overcome passivity.

Occupational therapy has the following main areas:

• Responsibility
• Independence and ability to appropriately react in various situations of every day life
• Self-care and personal hygiene skills training
• Job skills development
• Play
• Leisure
• Education and development of cognitive skills
• Motility development and training
• Self-image and self-esteem formation
• Interpersonal skills development

The use of artistic environment helps accessing different experiences at a sensorial level (perfume, texture, melody etc) and also exercising motility.

All components of music (singing, improvising, rhythm, lyrics writing, movement, sound, discussions), plastic arts are used to help the child to overcome some of his difficulties, to maintain his health and improve his life quality, to develop arias such as: cognitive, motility, emotional, behavior, social.

Psychodrama is a therapy method that facilitates the continuation and ending of different experiences and actions of the child (past experiences, unfinished situations, desires, traumatic events, future experiences etc) under the form of dramatization, role play and dramatized self-presentation.

All these combined therapies and techniques help achieving the goals related to child’s harmonious development and his abilities to live independently.