Between the Clinical and the Creative: Medical and Arts-Based Paradigms in Mental Health Practices. Perspectives from Cairo and the UK.

 

Mental health practice sits between two ways of knowing. The medical paradigm, with its classificatory systems, diagnostic categories, and symptom-oriented outcome measures provides a shared clinical language, structures access to services and anchors the evidence base through which treatments are evaluated. The creative paradigm, encompassing arts therapies, creative health practices, and arts-based approaches to wellbeing, operates through different logics: relational, embodied, aesthetic, and emergent. It attends to dimensions of human experience that are often limited with medical frameworks, for example meaning-making, cultural expression, sensory and somatic knowledge, and the irreducibly particular quality of individual lives.

This panel brings together practitioners and researchers from Cairo and the United Kingdom to explore these questions from multiple, practice-grounded perspectives. Speaking from the distinct but intersecting contexts of Egyptian psychiatry, arts and health research at Cairo University, UK NHS mental health services, and dance movement psychotherapy practices, the panellists examine how medical and creative paradigms interact in their own work, where they complement, where they create tension, and where creative approaches reveal possibilities that medical frameworks alone cannot accommodate.

The panel moves from the medical and psychiatric framing of mental health practice in Egypt, through psychological and research perspectives on arts and health, to the lived experience of practising music therapy within NHS secondary care and the embodied, translational dimensions of working across languages, movement traditions, and cultural contexts. The discussion is designed to be accessible and engaging for an international audience of arts therapists, creative health practitioners, mental health professionals, and researchers.

By placing Cairo and UK perspectives in dialogue, the panel foregrounds the cultural specificity of how medical and creative paradigms are negotiated in practice. It invites an honest conversation about what is gained and what is lost when creative practitioners work within medically-structured services, and what becomes possible when medical practitioners engage with the arts. The aim is to explore the tension between paradigms as a generative space for practice, research, and cross-cultural learning.

 

Structure

The seminar will take place from 18:00 – 19:30 (BST) on Tuesday 21 April.

Each panellist will present for ten minutes, drawing on clinical vignettes, research findings, and practice-based reflections, with time for reflection from attendees.
 

The Panel

  • Professor Fadia Alwan, Professor of Developmental Psychology/Human and Educational Sciences, Cairo University
  • Professor Ayman Amer, Professor of Cognitive Psychology & Creativity, Cairo University
  • Mario Eugster, PhD Candidate, Music Therapist, CNWL NHS Foundation Trust
  • Professor Dominik Havsteen-Franklin, Professor of Practice in Arts Therapies, Brunel University
  • Dr. Nasser Loza, Consultant Psychiatrist & Director, The Behman Hospital, Cairo
  • Yara Nasrany, Dance Movement Psychotherapist, CNWL NHS Foundation Trust
  • Sara Nassar, Doctoral Researcher, Applied Arts Specialist, Cairo University

 

Target Audience

For practitioners working across both paradigms as arts therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and creative health practitioners frequently do, the question is not whether one paradigm should replace the other, but how they might work together.

This course will help you consider:

  • What does it mean to work clinically within medical structures whilst also practicing creatively?
  • How do different cultural and institutional contexts shape the relationship between medical and creative approaches?
  • What kinds of knowledge about distress, recovery, and human flourishing are generated when arts-based practices are taken seriously within mental health settings?

The discussion is designed to be accessible and engaging for an international audience of arts therapists, creative health practitioners, mental health professionals, and researchers.

 

Location

Room MCST 054
Brunel University of London
Kingston Lane
Uxbridge UB8 3PH