Growing up, I heard no one talk about mental wellbeing, much less about mental health. These days, many more understand that depression, addiction, bi-polar disorder, to name just a few, are part of every family and every culture. Counselling has become more acceptable but rarely are people able to find the tools to help themselves outside of costly professional sessions.

Contemporary lives are increasingly more stressful, and expectations have changed drastically with the social media age. Work obligations, lack of work, global and domestic politics, and the threat of climate change all factor into inevitably multiplying one’s anxiety levels.

With the age of industrialisation, and now the internet, email, and online workgroups, the advent of relentless workdays and demanding work schedules have become a norm, leaving little room for self-reflection, or time to take a breath as we run to stand still. Everyone must work to make a living, but well-paying gigs are often akin to high paid servitude, with unreasonable demands and expected outcomes, compounded by thoughtless leadership.

Those who cannot afford the education or don’t have access to skills that allow them to earn high incomes suffer from the ignominy of scrambling for income, working construction jobs in blazing desert countries, or menial jobs domestically.

It has become increasingly apparent that this paradigm must shift. How can we evolve to make labour more meaningful? How can our personal lives be separated and fulfilled alongside our public work life?

The wellness industry has burgeoned, mainly due to highly-stressed, high-income people looking for succour. This seemingly therapeutic construct bombards us with phrases about breath and mindfulness, but much of this is as extractive as any other commercial venture, with little authenticity or real nuance.

One only needs to attend a yoga or mediation class with an overly pious teacher to experience their disapproval of any other way outside of their own. There is very little balance in the world of the corporate executive and the practicising yogi, both are often extreme. Not many people have the skills in-built to step back from these poles to work out a more long lasting balance.

So, how can art and health overlap to enrich and soothe our everyday lives that are filled with so many quotidian stressors? While art therapy is used often for trauma victims, the need to incorporate sustained access to creative outlets for therapy purposes for people across the strata of income and education is daunting.

While high earners have more means and access to counsellors, therapists and art related activities, the majority do not have any such recourse. Some people may naturally gravitate towards journalling, cooking or gardening to relieve stress, but again, these are activities, or rather, little luxuries, available to the middle class and above.

Creative outlets can be cultivated at the school levels starting from Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres and into primary, middle and high schools with hands-on vocational classes, and art and music lessons as well as emphasis on reading and writing.

In Nepal, our education system mandates that we excel at mathematics, incorporating arithmetic, algebra, geometry and later trigonometry into the curriculum, along with biology, chemistry and physics, all simultaneously. Why do we not also add in the arts and humanities element with at least one class geared towards cultivating creativity?

The Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC), has already taken a step in this direction, with their Book Free Friday initiative in schools, which commenced in early 2023, allowing teachers the flexibility to choose activities outside of the rigorous STEM-oriented curriculum.

The schools have the choice of both vocational and creative (the two can be complementary, not mutually exclusive) activities like agriculture, tailoring, coding, and traditional music to widen the experience and skills of children from the 9th till the 12th grades, giving them 90 hours of experience in something or the other. The programme is limited to around 50 government schools, and so far, none of the private schools seem to have taken up this initiative, which has been met with both enthusiasm and, of course, some scepticism.

This kind of exposure to learning practical and creative tools opens up a world of opportunities for students who are stuck in the rut of rote learning. Fixing something with your hands, learning about the classical sarangi and how to play it are skills that will serve the individual far beyond their school education, and provide much needed therapeutic benefits whose impact is hard to quantify, but is invaluable.

At Budhanilkantha School, we spent hours learning orthographic drawing in our woodworking modules that we started in the 8th grade as part of a well intentioned vocational training programme (choosing between woodworking and agriculture).

While I am grateful for the rigorous training on how to make working drawings, which has served me well as a film-maker, I deeply regret that the course included absolutely no creative, practical work whatsoever. We passed our SLC exams in woodworking without ever having touched a tool. Today, I wish I had those tactile woodworking skills so that I could take my mind off of everything and build something useful and beautiful.

Recently, Ranjita Dhital, a London-based public health researcher of Nepali origin, and a self-described neurodivergent person, was part of a publication titled the Routledge Handbook of Arts and Health. The text itself is a great primer on how to approach artistic practices as essential aspects of human lives. Dhital’s essay focuses on her experiences as an Asian woman working in the developing field of Creative Health that is still dominated by white people. She grapples with these issues of inclusivity in her essay as she explores how art therapy can be used to address malaise in Nepal.

The handbook was, for me, an essential step towards understanding that humanity is a creative species, not a purely functional one; and when one’s humanity is under siege, either by trauma, by illness, mental or physical, it is by tapping into one’s creative self that one can help in healing the mind, and by extension, the body.

However, that river of creativity is something that runs through us always, and should not only be something we turn to in times of need. Like with the KMC’s ‘Book Free Friday’ we should try to incorporate some creative joy into our daily lives in whatever way we can. Some of us are able to do it ourselves, others can turn to resources like the Routledge Handbook, or, if they have means, counsellors, and hopefully if Book Free Friday can be scaled up, these skills will become a part of the life of every youth in this country, adding much quality to our manic lives and overwrought psyches.