Activities Program

Innovative, unique, and deliberately separated from the intensive treatment atmosphere, the Activities Program offers you the opportunity to take up the role of student rather than patient in a wide variety of creative and intellectual pursuits.

Watch an overview of the Austen Riggs Activities Program in this video.

Riggs has an Activities Program. It's not activities treatment, it's creative expression. It's a place where patients can put down the intensity of the treatment process, put down the role of patient, and take up the role of creative artists, and expand your understanding of the world around you and your participation in it.

Joan Erikson started the Activities Program in the 1950s. The thinking was action of any sort by the patients is better than inaction and would allow in that more meaning and growth in the work that they were doing. The program started with painting. It grew from there. There's ceramics, there's fiber arts, there's a woodworking studio, there's a theater program, there's a greenhouse, there's a nursery school. The caliber of offerings that this program has is amazing.

Students at Austen Riggs learn about the Activities Program through a meeting that we have about 2 weeks into their stay. You can come right down and get to know us and get started. So, it's not like an earned privilege.

The patients work with us voluntarily. We want you to do the things that you want to do. It's a very supportive atmosphere of learning and trying something new, taking risks at a time in people's life where that can be a challenge.

While the activities department is not considered a clinical space, it does end up being very therapeutic.

The experiences that the patients have, they might take back and speak to their therapists about it. But we're very clear that we're in this art form and we're not doing therapy.

The Activities Program allows for patients to come and be students and express themselves in their own unique ways. Art and life - they reflect each other, whether a student becomes an artist or not. It gives them an additional way of understanding who they are and giving them a way of seeing how they can shape their lives.

Riggs is about exploring and achieving the life that you want. People here can do that on the clinical side and they also have the opportunity to work in the activities department and explore a creative side. It's a holistic approach to human development and progress.

Joan Erikson had a wonderful idea to allow patients to be part of a community still as part of their treatment, and that was one of the most important things that she could have brought to the Center.

Beyond the intensity of our extraordinary clinical program, the Activities Program opens new doors for patients to engage in the world, the creative opportunities of this program, open doors that they would not experience in only an intensive treatment program. These allow people to move out into the world with new languages, new skills, and new opportunities.