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.

We've developed an Activities Program in which the people who come here for treatment go to it not as patients but as students. It's not activities therapy. It's exploring your creative potential, and if you find that therapeutic and helpful, that's great, but you go there as a student, not as a patient.

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.

Because we're here to guide them through all of this, they are learning just like any other person and so they leave here with such an amazing skill set to work in other programs and that is the goal is to help them to know that they have skills and they have meaning and they have something to bring to a community.

Beyond all the clinical services offered at Riggs and all the richness that comes from them, the Activities Program really offers an unparalleled opportunity to open up, learn about, and develop creative capacities that can really help change a person's life. It can make a huge difference and be an important part of a total package of treatment.