Arts and Healing Resiliency Center

The Arts & Healing Resiliency Center at Mind Matters, PC empowers and nurtures mental health well-being through workshops. special events, mentoring, and therapy. Creative Life Lines, a service within the Center, is dedicated to preventing suicide, and reaches out with compassion and creativity to help save lives.

ARTS Program is the unifying concept of the Arts & Healing Resiliency Center. The ARTS Program aim is to inspire Adolescent & Adult Resiliency Training, Skills & Support. The ARTS Program interweaves evidence based mental health skills, positive psychology principles, and the creative arts to promote, nurture, and build mental health and life affirming resilience. The goal of the ARTS Program is a felt sense of personal integrity, authenticity, and responsibility leading to social-emotional and behavioral well-being.

Visit the Arts & Healing Resiliency Gallery

The Arts & Healing Resiliency Center is dedicated to the elimination of silence, shame, and stigma, and preventing suicide, Creative Life Lines has developed a series of suicide prevention posters and cards with accompanying resource information. “Everyday is Suicide Prevention Day” as poster and pin, and the “Don’t Give Up,” poster promote compassionate awareness and build caring community.

The Arts & Healing Resiliency Center offers workshops, therapy groups, special events, mentoring, therapy, collaboration, and consultation. Due to the coronavirus pandemic these services are held online. When safe to do so, there will be a return to onsite services at Mind Matters, PC. The Center shares links to Resiliency Resources such as The Insight Timer which is a free and vast compilation of healing modalities for body, mind, and spirit. The Center’s Facebook page is Arts & Healing Resiliency Center.

Please see the Mind Matters, PC Calendar of Events or Reoccurring Groups for upcoming workshops, special events, and therapy groups.

Diane Kaufman, MD is founder-director of the Arts & Healing Resiliency Center. She is a poet, artist, and child psychiatrist. Prior to becoming a psychiatrist, Diane had completed training and certification as a pediatrician. Diane has received Humanism in Medicine awards, is a Gold Doc (Arnold P. Gold Foundation), and in 2019 was honored by SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University - Alumni Association with the Dr. Frank L. Babbott Memorial Award recognizing her distinguished service to both the medical profession and the general community. Diane has received grants for child abuse prevention and arts & healing projects. She was guiding spirit and benefactor of Creative Arts Healthcare at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (now Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, Newark campus).

Diane’s healing from trauma story, “Bird That Wants to Fly,” inspired a children’s opera and is narrated by the actor Danny Glover. “Bird That Wants to Fly” received an Oregon Regional Arts and Culture Council grant in 2019 for it to be transformed into a puppetry performance. Diane presents nationally and internationally on Arts, Healing & Resiliency. She was keynote speaker at the National Association of Poetry Therapy Conference in 2015. She has most recently presented Medical School Grand Rounds on “Shame Kills. Hope Heals. Creating Compassion and Preventing Suicide.”

The Arts & Healing Resiliency Center and ASHA International are proud to announce the launch of the “If My Words Could Make A Difference” Youth Mental Health Campaign. This project received 2021 grant funding from the Oregon Council of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Its inspiration was an essay Diane Kaufman, MD, wrote titled, “If My Words Could Make A Difference This Is What I Would Say.” She spontaneously wrote this upon hearing of the mental health struggles – anxiety, depression, and suicidality – confronting many of her youth patients.

The voices of youth are so important! Our hope is that the “If My Words Could Make A Difference” Youth Mental Health Campaign will inspire youth to contribute their ideas and creative work to the campaign. The overarching goal of the campaign is to improve youth mental health by encouraging youth’s expression of their mental health needs by sharing their thoughts, feelings, ideas, and creativity with receptive audiences in the mental health community who can then act on their behalf to make positive change.

Please see the If My Words Could Make a Difference campaign to learn more about the “If My Words Could Make A Difference” Youth Mental Health Campaign. The site has a video of Dr. Kaufman explaining about the project, and links to the “If My Words” essay, “Don’t Give Up” song and animated video, and a listing of Mental Health Resources.

Please see below for the links to Dr. Kaufman’s co-creative suicide prevention cards/posters, books and chapters, the opera performance, poetry, songs, presentations, and testimonials.

To ask questions and connect with Dr. Kaufman directly, please email drdiane@mindmatterspc.com. To learn more see Arts and Healing Resiliency Center and Transforming Trauma Into Creative Resilience.