Healing through Photography

Photography is usually thought of either as a profession, or a leisure activity for those travelling to exciting cities and exotic countries, but one can gain far more from photography than might be expected.

“In the United Kingdom, one in four adults live with a mental health issue”.

- Source, Mind

Mental health awareness has come to the forefront of many discussions over the last few years and people are searching for various ways to combat the impact that poor mental health can have on their daily lives.

Photography has now been shown to have a positive impact on mental health and increase mental well-being. Using photography to improve mental health is known as therapeutic photography or, Phototherapy.

What is Phototherapy?

According to the Phototherapy Centre, therapeutic photography can be defined as the use of photo-based activities that are self-initiated either as an individual or as a part of an organized group or project, but in the absence of formal therapy components.

Phototherapy can also be referred to as ‘mindful photography’. It combines the process of mindfulness and photography which grants an individual the opportunity to be open to different perceptions. Mindful photography involves capturing a perspective in one frame which grasps its essence and reveals how we view people, objects or landscapes around us.

What is Phototherapy used to treat?

Over the years, Phototherapy has been successfully helping people overcome or live simultaneously with mental illness without dampening their quality of life.

Some conditions that phototherapy has been shown to effectively treat are:

• Overcoming PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)
• Anxiety and depression

It has also been shown to help people cope with the stigma associated with:

• OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder)
• Male mental health
• Schizophrenia

According to the Royal College of Psychologists, during the post-pandemic era, there was a 43 per cent increase in urgent and emergency mental health cases. This added pressure increased the demand for medical attention in an already overwhelmed healthcare environment. In many cases, phototherapy could have been utilised to help treat minor mental health issues before they got more serious. Phototherapy was not used more widely due to the lack of research connecting it to mental well-being before the pandemic and the focus at the time was the severity of the spread of Covid-19 virus.

Who can use Phototherapy?

Due to the advancements in technology, the availability of cameras could not be better, due to most people having access to a smart phone.

Phototherapy does not require any fancy, expensive cameras which allows the possibility of more people incorporating mindful photography into their lives. Regardless of your skillset with cameras, you can integrate mindful photography into your routine to aid with mental well-being. To ensure that your experience is not cut-short as you are gearing up to take on this new mental health journey, look into our camera insurance as it covers all types of photographers from amateurs to professionals in the UK and worldwide.

Ways to use photography for mental health

As we have seen throughout this discussion, photography has its advantages when it comes to navigating mental illness. Therefore, it is best to put some methods into practice to get the best insight. These ways include:

Find an object that reflects how you are feeling

Capture moments of your daily routine

Go for a leisurely walk and document it

Positive impact of photography

Photography as a method of navigating mental illness brings a host of benefits into an individual’s life. Some of these benefits are:

• It provides security when participating in a group
• It is a gentle approach to difficult feelings
• Creates a bridge between people without a sense of pressure
• It allows you to view oneself in the context of your life
• Mindfulness – reduces stress

When participating in an organised group pertaining to therapy, it may be difficult for a person to feel comfortable enough to share their feelings or opinions. By utilising photography, it places the focus onto an activity instead of the individual.

Formal therapy can be an invasive process that may be intense. This would be a harsh method to extract certain feelings out of an individual on any traumatic topic. Whereas photography allows the individual to process each photo and its corresponding meaning at their own pace. This gives one the ability to take on what you can handle at a time.

As part of an organised group, interactions between participants prove to be difficult to initiate. Therefore, having an exercise to do together, opens the space and instigates conversations.

When embarking on your healing journey, it may prove to be difficult to look inwards and evaluate aspects of your life from an outer perspective. Using photography, it gives you the possibility of capturing the moment and dissecting it afterwards.

Research has shown that being mindful has led to a reduction in stress through the process allowing for the regulation of emotions, brain activity and brain health. It slows down the mind from wandering which is a contributing factor of stress. Mindfulness is about noticing a pattern of thoughts or emotions and building a resilience and awareness to help process it.

Therapeutic value of photography

Mental health is a complex topic and has been the victim of a wave of stigma and preconceived notions from society and even family. Photography allows for individuals to have a private way, if they need it to be, to navigate their emotions at their own pace and through a medium that is suitable for them.

The correlation between therapy and photography can be highlighted through the experience of Dr.Gibson depicted in an article published by Canon. During his time working with asylum seekers in Belgium, he uncovered the power that photography holds. He provided the camera and was stunned by what the asylum seekers decided to focus their photos on. He stated, “all the photographs came back, and they were really positive aspects of life in the centre… and that was my first taste of using photography to explore your situation”.

Photography can also improve the awareness of mental health issues by providing a more authentic perspective focusing on the individual taking the photo, which negates the popularity of misunderstandings of what mental illness looks like (the headclutcher photo).

The headclutcher photo promotes a specific stereotype surrounding mental illnesses such as depression, which some believe that it pokes fun at mental illness. By providing the narrative from a first-person perspective through photography, it allows more organic and accurate representations of mental illness to be introduced. This will aid in mitigating the stigma that revolves around mental health.