Therapeutic spaces of care farming: Transformative or ameliorating?

Abstract

Since Wil Gesler's earliest articulation (Gesler, 1992; Gesler, 1996) key thinkers in the field of therapeutic landscapes have sought to emphasise the embodied, contextual and wholly relational nature of the relationship that exists between people and place. However, the extant research has tended to focus on the relational healing experience as this occurs 'in the moment' and with reference to a specific location or site of healing, with less attention being paid to what happens to people when they return to their ordinary or everyday places. In this paper, we reflect on findings from visual ethnographic work (including photography and film) that explored the therapeutic landscape experiences of people with intellectual disabilities engaged in care farming interventions for health and wellbeing. The study also recruited farm staff and family members or carers to take part, and comprised 20 participants in total. Having identified a gap in our understanding, consideration is given to wider impact that engaging in these sorts of activities had on the everyday lives of the participants in this study. We argue that this study has identified two types of therapeutic journey that broadly fit the experiences of study participants. The first type of journey denotes landscape experiences that are transformative. Here the therapeutic power of the care farm landscape resides in the ability of activities conducted on care farms to influence other aspects of participants' lives in ways that promote wellbeing. By contrast, there is another type of journey where the therapeutic power of the care farm resides in its ability to ameliorate challenging or harmful life situations, thus offering people a temporary site of respite or refuge. We conclude that these findings denote an important development for this sub-field of health geography, not only because they draw attention to the transformative power of the therapeutic encounter, but also the broader socio-spatial environments in which people live and ways in which these can limit that power.

What’s in it for the animals? Symbiotically considering ‘therapeutic’ human-animal relations within spaces and practices of care farming

“…34. Alexandra Kaley, Chris Hatton, and Christine Milligan (2019). “Therapeutic spaces of care farming: Transformative or ameliorating?” Social Science & Medicine .…”

Social Farming: An Inclusive Environment Conducive to Participant Personal Growth

“…As Kaley et al (2019) highlights, the aspects on which the participants improved are linked to psycho-attitudinal skills, in particular those connected to basic skills in the working world. In addition, the farm stage path is significant, especially in terms of theoretical knowledge of the technical aspects, but not of skills and abilities.…”

Care-farming as a catalyst for healthy and sustainable lifestyle choices in those affected by traumatic grief

“…Recent years have seen care-farming utilized as an intervention for multiple populations, including autism (Ferwerda-van Zonneveld et al, 2012), acquired brain injury (Hassink et al, 2007), dementia (Bruin et al, 2009;de Boer et al, 2015), substance addiction (Hine et al, 2008;Leck et al, 2015), emotional and mental unwellness (Elings and Hassink, 2008;Iancu et al, 2014), and within the criminal justice system (Elsey et al, 2018;Murray et al, 2016). There is a growing body of evidence relating to the potential health benefits that can emerge from participation within a care-farming program, ranging from client specific outcomes such as reduced depressive symptoms (Pedersen et al, 2012), impacts on recidivism (Pretty et al, 2013), and changing levels of independence (Kaley et al, 2018), to more general impacts on health and well-being, such as increasing social interaction (Iancu et al, 2014), improving confidence, and decreasing stress (Leck et al, 2015). Alongside these specific symptomatic approaches and outcomes, care-farms have also been linked to enabling a level of 'flourishing across the life-course' (Devine-Wright et al, 2019, p. 2).…”

“…Elings and Hassink (2008) found that being at a care-farm helped clients overcome issues of substance abuse through decreasing boredom and meaninglessness, with the farm providing a place of purpose. Contact with animals, as part of a care-farm experience, can stimulate the uptake of healthy behaviors (Hassink et al, 2017) and encourage participants to pursue more active lifestyles (Kaley et al, 2018). Physical exertion on care-farms can also lead to improvements in sleep hygiene; physically tiring work leads to sleeping well (Besterman-Dahan et al, 2018;Elings and Hassink, 2008;Leck et al, 2015) and can reduce 'the inclination to engage in negative behaviors after having returned home' (Leck et al, 2015, p. 753) (though Leck et al do not qualify what kind of 'negative behaviors they are referring to here).…”