Using Art As a Self-Regulating Tool in a War Situation: A Model for Social Workers (Report‪)‬

Social workers in war situations are often appointed to emergency roles in a professional capacity that may cause them to witness others being threatened, or be threatened themselves, with death or injury. War thus constitutes an intense, challenging situation for social workers, adding exposure to direct risk of personal harm to the secondary trauma and burnout that is the part of the general context of social work (Cohen, Gagin, & Peled-Avram, 2006; Gagin, Cohen, & Peled-Avram, 2009). Within this high-stress situation, social workers need accessible and simple tools with which to express, identify, and cope with their own stress and then address the stress of their clients. This study had three goals: (1) to portray the experience of social workers living in war through artworks, (2) to identify stress and resilience factors in their artworks, and (3) to develop a model for intervention social work professionals during these situations, which then can be used as a model of intervention with distressed populations during wartime.