Volume 11 Issues 4 April, 2021
Be it the beautiful trees that flower every year in our hospitals, the countless drugs derived from plants, or the Horatio’s Garden, a national charity of the United Kingdom, providing a promising livelihood for spinal injury patients, plants are scattered across the realms of modern medicine, helping tackle various aspects of treating patients.
In this piece, we will be discussing the role of horticulture in treating psychiatric illnesses, and why prescribing a small pot of a local house plant may be surprisingly beneficial.
- Reducing autonomic activity and stress: A randomised control study published in the Journal of Physiological Anthropology, concluded that active interaction with indoor plants can reduce psychological stress. These interactions lowered autonomic activity and promoted a sense of calm and soothing. For patients who reside in a headspace that is constantly battling the overwhelming thoughts and emotions that mental illnesses create, any reliable cues in their environment that could provide ease are very essential.
- Overcoming cognitive fatigue and providing energy: A study by Berman et al., compared the restorative effects on cognitive functioning of interactions with natural versus urban environments. A walk in nature and caring for indoor plants were found to restore cognitive capacity and improve concentration and well-being in mentally ill patients. The intriguing stimuli and need for focus modestly grab attention in a bottom- up fashion, allowing top-down directed attention abilities a chance to replenish while their urban counterparts in environment such as TV or computer screens capture attention dramatically and require additional energy input which makes these activities less restorative for brain function.
- Improving self-esteem and self-efficacy: Successful care-taking of plants promotes a feeling of accomplishment, and a sense of purpose in a day. The returns from a healthy plant are high and very satisfying, a sharp contrast to several mindless activities that flood the average experience of an urban dweller. A study analyzing the effects of a group based horticultural experience on quality of life of persons with chronic mental illness showed immediate and positive effect on life satisfaction, well-being and self-concept after the six-week study period.
- Low expectancy companionship: Plants themselves provide easy friendship and have also been found to make interaction in social circles easier for those with mental illnesses. In a study by Rappe et al., participants were psychiatric out patients who along with their support persons indulged in group gardening showed an improvement in interpersonal exchanges and self-esteem, thus improving exchanges with people around them.
- Plants also help in the practice of mindfulness: The care of plants elicits the habit of observing and staying in the present. The activities anchor attention and ground the wandering head, making negative thoughts that arise less intimidating and more accessible to help.
- They’re a mirror: Awareness of self and remembering to check in and care for one self, is very important in patients presenting with self-neglect. The status of a plant often reflects its owner’s headspace.
- Their daily needs provide a good routine that can be learnt and followed. Addressing their needs reminds a patient to pay attention to their own. In the grand scheme of things, aren’t we walking and thinking plants? We need food, water and plenty of sunlight, and caring for plants are a great reminder of one’s basic needs, which are often forgotten during the hard battle against psychiatric illnesses.
The focus of treating mental illnesses is often illness centric, rather than health centric and providing importance to positive psychology and healthy habits in recovery approaches would make possible the longstanding rhetoric, that health is more than just the absence of illness. This concept necessitates the use of new entities in the treatment of psychiatric illnesses and suggesting the cultivation of new interests, an effective and beneficial example being growing plants, could be a great inclusion in the care of psychiatric patients.
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