Working from Scraps

Could scrapbooking have applications as a form of therapeutic intervention for people living with mental illness, dementia, or other health concerns?

Scrapbooking is a fun, crafty hobby, and much like crossstitching and adult colouring books, it has a multitude of positive benefits that can help people experiencing poor mental health, among a multitude of other things. Research from Joanna King et al from the Therapeutic Recreation Journal showed that scrapbooking is an excellent way for people to help navigate grief, and can be incorporated into healthy grief rituals to help people who have experienced loss to connect with their feelings, verbalise their hurt, and connect with people. Jenny Douge’s research in Procedia from 2010 explored the benefits of scrapbooking as an application of narrative therapy, where scrapbooking helped children living with physical disabilities or difficulties surrounding their emotional behaviour, encouraging them to externalise problems and gain new perspective through crafting. Scrapbooking may also have applications benefiting older people in a variety of ways. It might be beneficial to people living with dementia as it provides not only a way to preserve memories, but both a stimulating crafting activity and a memento that can be treasured and engaged with whenever the participant likes. It can also be used as an aspect of other kind of interventions: scrapbooks can be as tactile as the creator desires, using a whole host of materials which feel nice, make noise, sparkle, and twinkle. They can also be used as a kind of journal to chart feelings, thoughts and happenings, making them a powerful tool for both memory and self-exploration. As with many art-based interventions, scrapbooking also may assist in the promotion of community, too.

A 2013 study by Mouradian et al sought to explore the benefits of art-based therapies in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) as a means to decrease anxiety caused by stress and used scrapbooking as its primary means of therapy. The team concluded that when used as a brief intervention, scrapbooking promoted a statistically significant decline in participants’ overall anxiety, and participants said that the intervention distracted them from the stress of having children in NICU, as well as relaxing them, giving them something pleasurable to do, providing a sense of hope, and giving an opportunity to share their lived experience with others who also knew first-hand how they felt.

Scrapbooking can trace its roots back as far as the 15th century to its ancestor, the commonplace books. Also called commonplaces, they had existed since antiquity, but in 15th century England, they were used as books in which people compiled recipes, quotes, poems, letters, and other information that they deemed important or significant. This developed into friendship albums; according to the British Library, these books emerged in the 16th century amongst German and Dutch speaking students who would go on tours of other European cities to complete their studies. On the way, they’d make paintings, drawings, or take notes of the places they’d been, including things like signatures, the coats of arms, and some even had interactive “lift-the-flap” pictures that you might see in a modern children’s book! They functioned in a way not dissimilar to yearbooks, in which people on their travels might ask new friends to sign them and add a humorous saying. In a sense, they were like Ye Olde Facebook: a record of the friends they gathered on their travels that they could then show off when they got home. Modern scrapbooking is thought to have been brought to the masses by American Marielen Wadley Christensen, whose volume of 50 ring binders full of carefully arranged family photographs and records gained her an invitation to the World Conference on Records in the 1980s. She and her husband A.J. published a pamphlet, Keeping Memories Alive, on how to scrapbook, and the pair opened a scrapbooking shop of the same name in Spanish Fork, Utah. This opened the door to many would-be scrapbookers, and now, it’s grown to be the third most popular craft in the United States! Scrapbooking in the modern age no longer even requires the presence of the titular scrap: digital scrapbooking encourages people to create things using graphics software - like Gimp, Photoshop, or other specialist software - meaning it can be done anywhere that the crafter can access their tools, even on their phone!