We believe in community: Using creative arts to help student veterans cope

The physical and psychological health of our returning veterans poses a growing and urgent public health challenge. With the escalating suicide rate affecting both veterans and their families and the wide spectrum of debilities impeding reintegration into civilian life, we need new and innovative strategies to help our veterans cope. Given the unusually long duration of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of these returning vets are entering our institutions of higher learning. At a major state university, we have seen more veterans enter nursing education, for a variety of reasons and with a vast array of issues requiring consideration and accommodation. In response, we sought and secured seed money to develop a workshop offering our student veterans the opportunity to learn new skills for self-exploration and stress reduction while also providing a community of like-minded allies to buffer the impersonal bureaucracy of a large state institution. We launched the Vets Creative Strengths project in the fall of 2012. The facilitation was interdisciplinary: Department of Disability Studies and Performance; Department of Psychiatry and the Art Institute; the College of Nursing. We devoted four weeks to each medium: self-exploration through visual art, personal narrative and performance. As we witnessed each others' struggles and creations, we bonded. Our work was showcased in an exhibit sponsored by the Art Institute: The Art of Connection. We plan to create our own installation at the University and look forward to sharing the applicability of what we learned with a wider peace-minded audience.