Scribbling Your Practice

Course Description

Scribbling Your Practice is an invitation to imagine mental health care as something bigger, stranger, and more alive than the traditional therapy room. Grounded in Scribble’s values of creativity, connection, collaboration, and liberatory care, we’ll explore what becomes possible when we understand mental health as deeply connected to community, culture, relationships, art, play, and the worlds we build together. This workshop invites practitioners to question some of the assumptions we’ve inherited about what therapy is supposed to look like and to experiment with more expansive, human, and creative ways of supporting one another. Come ready to scribble outside the lines, get curious, and imagine what our practices might become.

Instructor Information

Educational Goals

1. Develop an understanding of how creativity, play, community, and relational connection can expand traditional approaches to mental health practice.
2. Develop greater capacity to critically reflect on the assumptions, systems, and power structures that shape clinical practice and the ways we understand healing.
3. Develop an understanding of how practitioners can bring their own values, creativity, and humanity into the therapeutic relationship while maintaining thoughtful clinical boundaries.

Measurable Learning Objectives

1. Participants will be able to identify at least three ways that creativity, play, and community can be incorporated into clinical practice.
2. Participants will be able to describe at least two ways that traditional assumptions about mental health can shape clinical practice and client care.
3. Participants will be able to apply at least one creative or relational practice to a clinical scenario while maintaining appropriate therapeutic boundaries.

Outline with Main Points for Each Topic (including times)

1. 12:45–1:00 PM · Opening: What Does It Mean to “Scribble” Your Practice? — Obj 1, 2 — 15 minutes

   • Introduce Scribble’s approach to mental health, community, creativity, and care.
   • Examine assumptions about what therapy and “professional” clinical practice are supposed to look like.
   • Introduce creativity, play, curiosity, and relationality as clinical resources.

2. 1:00–1:20 PM · Expanding the Frame of Mental Health Practice — Obj 2 — 20 minutes

   • Identify ways traditional clinical frameworks can limit how we understand people and healing.
   • Describe how systems, culture, power, and context influence clinical practice.
   • Consider clients’ resourcefulness, relationships, identities, communities, and lived experiences as sources of knowledge and strength.
   • Introduce a more collaborative and curious stance toward the therapeutic relationship.

3. 1:20–1:45 PM · Bringing Creativity Into the Therapy Room — Obj 1, 3 — 25 minutes

   • Identify ways creativity, play, metaphor, movement, writing, art, and ritual can support therapeutic work.
   • Review research evidence for creative and expressive interventions in therapy (creative arts therapies, art therapy) and its limits.
   • Explore examples of creative interventions that can expand conversations beyond traditional talk therapy.
   • Consider how clinicians can use their own creativity and humanity while maintaining clinical boundaries.
   • Apply creative and relational practices to brief clinical examples.

4. 1:45–2:05 PM · From Ideas to Practice: Scribbling Your Own Practice — Obj 1, 3 — 20 minutes

   • Identify opportunities within participants’ existing practices to incorporate more creativity, play, curiosity, and collaboration.
   • Develop at least one concrete practice or experiment participants can bring into their clinical work.
   • Reflect on how clinicians can remain responsive to clients rather than relying solely on predetermined clinical formulas.

5. 2:05–2:15 PM · Closing & Integration — Obj 1, 3 — 10 minutes

   • Review key principles of a creative, relational, and expansive approach to mental health.
   • Identify one specific practice participants will carry forward into their work.
   • Allow space for questions, reflection, and integration.

Total instructional time: 15 + 20 + 25 + 20 + 10 = 90 minutes / 60 = 1.5 CE hours

Signing in and out

• Sign in at the door before 12:45 PM.
• Sign out and complete this session’s evaluation at the door when it ends at 2:15 PM.
• Sign-in, sign-out and the evaluation are not part of the 1.5 CE hours.

References

• de Witte, M., Orkibi, H., Zarate, R., Karkou, V., Sajnani, N., Malhotra, B., Ho, R. T. H., Kaimal, G., Baker, F. A., & Koch, S. C. (2021). From therapeutic factors to mechanisms of change in the creative arts therapies: A scoping review. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 678397. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.678397
• Fancourt, D., Aughterson, H., Finn, S., Walker, E., & Steptoe, A. (2021). How leisure activities affect health: A narrative review and multi-level theoretical framework of mechanisms of action. The Lancet Psychiatry, 8(4), 329–339. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(20)30384-9
• Flückiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., & Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 316–340. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000172
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• Hu, J., Zhang, J., Hu, L., Yu, H., & Xu, J. (2021). Art therapy: A complementary treatment for mental disorders. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 686005. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.686005
• Kirkbride, J. B., Anglin, D. M., Colman, I., Dykxhoorn, J., Jones, P. B., Patalay, P., Pitman, A., Soneson, E., Steare, T., Wright, T., & Griffiths, S. L. (2024). The social determinants of mental health and disorder: Evidence, prevention and recommendations. World Psychiatry, 23(1), 58–90. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.21160
• Solnit, R. (2009). A paradise built in hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disaster. Viking.
• Spade, D. (2020). Mutual aid: Building solidarity during this crisis (and the next). Verso.