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Poetry therapy: How writing poems helps both patients and healthcare workers
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The Institute for Poetic Medicine founder John Fox says there are “many overlapping connections” between poetic medicine and other expressive therapies.
ST PHOTO: KUA CHEE SIONG
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SINGAPORE – For a few days in February, about 200 doctors, nurses, medical students, hospice staff and patients in Singapore read and wrote poems.
In a series of workshops, they and other healthcare workers reflected on poems that grappled with illness and mortality. Inspired by their own work and lives, they penned down their thoughts in free verse, even though some said they did not enjoy the literature classes they took decades ago in school.
One participant recalled a patient who had died unexpectedly. Another wrote stanzas sparked by the application of a medical grant. Some attendees pondered the burden of living with tumours. One person sang part of her poem.
