Thank you for inviting me to speak, I'm sorry not to be with you in person at the conference today, but I hope that this short talk will give you an overview about a new teaching development that I've been involved in in Oxford. Psychiatry is not often thought of as a pictorial discipline, however, observation and close attention to visual clues are a very important aspect of the psychiatric assessments.
With this in mind, I've been involved in a collaboration with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, exploring psychiatry through images and through objects. The Ashmolean Museum is part of the University of Oxford, and it really is a world class resource. There are amazing paintings, sculptures, drawings and archaeological artefacts in the museum, and it's free for all members of the university, but also for all members of the general public to go and look around.
So it really is a fantastic resource for us in Oxford. Traditionally, however, the Ashmolean has been used as a teaching resource for the disciplines of art history and for archaeology, but not for other university disciplines. That was until 2012 when the university engagement programme was developed. And this is a programme which has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Pictured here is Dr. Jim Harris. He is an art historian and a teaching curator with the University Engagement Programme. And I've worked very closely with him to see how we could use the resources of the Ashmolean to develop teaching sessions for psychiatrists that would be relevant to their clinical practise. We've developed a series of sessions and each session lasted approximately two hours.
The sessions were open to all psychiatrists in Oxford and we targeted some sessions at specific groups. But we've given sessions to core trainees to advance trainees and to consultants for each session. We've selected between 10 and 15 images, objects, sculptures. And Jim Harris has provided an introduction to these images. And then we've had an informal discussion thinking about people's responses to
the images and what relevance that might have for their clinical practise. We've tended to limit the group sizes to about eight, and keeping the group small has meant that we've been able to have really quite rich discussions about the individual objects.
I'm going to talk about two of the programmes today, and the first one was exploring emotions through images and objects, the aim of this was really to think about how mental illness has been presented through art and how emotional distress is presented. And the aim is to provide really an alternative viewpoints for clinicians to understand how their patients might present with different range of emotions.
Here you can see two different images, and this is focussing on grief, so on the left, as you look at the screen, is a drawing by Kaya's and it's three women mourning on the right is a drawing by Michelangelo called The Descent from the Cross. So two very different ways of portraying grief and of thinking about death. We looked at both these images in the museum study room, so we looked at them at very close range, and particularly for the Michelangelo.
It was really quite extraordinary to see an original Michelangelo drawing and to be able to look at it in such detail. We also thought about anger and here is a pen and ink drawing by Barbieri called the enraged housewife. And I think you'll agree this is a very powerful image and gave us quite a lot to think about.
And just one other example for you, this is an engraving by Albert Jura called Melancholia, and for a group of psychiatrists looking at this image, there's really much to comment on and much to think about. The next thing we thought about was age and ageing in art, and these sessions were attended mostly by old age psychiatrists. The aim here was to think about how old age is portrayed in an art, how that's changed over the years, and to think a little bit more broadly about ageing.
What does it mean to be old? When do people start becoming old? And to think about the influences that older people have on society and art? That's particularly relevant because, of course, older people often had the most money and could purchase works of art, but also thinking about how they were portrayed. I've got two examples for you here. This one is a chalk drawing by Danny called head of an old man. And here is a portrait by Rembrandts, and this is called Portrait of an Old Man.
So both those images give us much to think about when we're thinking about ageing, I think you'll agree, even in this short, short selection of images, we saw a huge range of things. And it was really quite amazing to see such high quality works of art and to use that as the focus for our discussion.
And much of the feedback we had was very positive indeed. For me, the most important thing that arose out of these sessions was that people were able to use the images and use the reflections and discussion to think about their clinical practise. So people thought more deeply about how their patients presented with emotional distress, about what it means to be old, what it might mean for a patient to be referred to the old age service and how they might think that they're portrayed.
When we were thinking about works of art, it was often important to think about the historical and the social context to work to the works of art, and that has an important parallel with current practise, because it's very important for us to think about the wider society context for our patients presentations. And so that was a useful parallel. The third thing, which I think was very important was about the space for reflection that learning in a museum provided.
So clinicians tended to come from hectic, busy NHS environments which are not renowned for their beauty. And they came to the Ashmolean, which is very elegant building with a lot of physical space. And I think actually coming to that environment and being able to reflect on clinical practise in that environment was an important aspect of the sessions. The important thing then is what do we do next and what is the wider applicability of this teaching initiative?
Firstly, in terms of psychiatry, Jim Harris and I have got lots of ideas about how we can take this forward. We're intending to run sessions on dreams and visions and on gender. And there are other ideas for themes is also possible to expand this idea for other medical specialities. And already a group of cardiologists have been to the Ashmolean and they have been looking at images of the human heart.
There's a possibility for extending this to undergraduate teaching, and I think they're the focus on developing diagnostic skills and paying attention to visual cues is very important. And finally, thinking further afield, I hope that by talking about this initiative and this collaboration with the Ashmolean, it might encourage other people to develop collaborations with their local museums to think about the sorts of learning opportunities that there are there.
In summary, medicine and psychiatry in particular has a long history of learning from the arts, and I hope this gives a more specific example of how we can do this now and about how learning from museums and linking and looking at the objects in museums can help people to reflect on my clinical practise, particularly in psychiatry, but also in other medical disciplines. Finally, it's a shame that I'm not able to take questions from the audience at this moment.
However, if you do have questions or if you'd like any further information, then please feel free to email me. Thank you very much.