Wonderbringers Newsletter with Monica Parker
Hello Wonderseekers!
Imagine this scene. You’ve been feeling burnt out. Overwhelmed by the news cycle. By the pressure to do too much. By a recalcitrant spring playing hide-and-seek behind winter’s gloomy gaze. Maybe there’s been a loss – of a job, of a person, of a dream. You’re caught in the bipolar emotional rip tide of depression and anxiety, currents shifting at will. Eventually, you decide you can’t tackle this season of discontent on your own, and you seek out your doctor. She listens, really listens, then reaches for her pad. In her barely legible scrawl she writes, “Take one pottery class stat. Repeat prn.”
It sounds like something out of speculative fiction, but it’s actually a glimpse of what could soon be happening across parts of the US. This month, Georgia became the first state to formally recognise the arts as mental health treatment. The legislature passed House Resolution 1007, acknowledging the arts as a mental‑health resource and laying the groundwork to steer future funding toward arts‑based programmes.
Georgia has already become a hub for “social prescribing” through Atlanta‑based Social Rx (formerly Art Pharmacy), which partners with clinics, Medicaid plans, and community groups serving anxious teens, isolated elders, and overworked carers. Doctors and mental‑health professionals can literally prescribe activities like dance classes, museum tours, ceramics workshops, botanical‑garden visits, or concerts as part of a care plan for anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Patients receive a set number of “doses” (for example, 12 arts or culture activities) and do not pay ticket or entry costs for those prescribed events. Underneath the beauty of this idea is solid evidence. These programmes are built on peer‑reviewed studies showing that arts engagement can ease mental health symptoms and strengthen social connections.
The Georgia Health Policy Center and the US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health are now evaluating Social Rx’s “smart‑matching” technology, aiming for a form of precision medicine that matches people to the right arts experiences to improve mental health symptoms. The platform evaluates clinical needs (anxiety, social isolation, chronic illness), personal goals, and practical constraints, then cross‑references them with a mapped network of local arts and culture offerings. It also considers each person’s artistic preferences and curiosities — music vs ceramics, quiet museums vs lively performances — so matches resonate rather than feeling clinical or forced. From there, an algorithm recommends specific, evidence‑informed artistic activities that research suggests will help with that person’s particular mental health profile.
Georgia’s programme sits inside a wider NeuroArts and arts‑in‑health movement. Atlanta is one of 11 communities chosen for a national NeuroArts Coalition “Arts and Health Laboratory” exploring how creativity shapes brain health across our lifespan. And Georgia is not alone. In the UK and elsewhere, creative social prescribing is emerging as a new kind of integrative treatment, with organisations contending that arts and culture can help address unmet health needs as well as reduce increasingly pervasive loneliness and community fragmentation.
Maybe the most radical part of this shift is what it says about what we think people deserve. Not just relief from symptoms but wonder and beauty and connection. Not a luxury accessible to the privileged, but a necessity for thriving public health. If a state legislature can look at the data and decide that concerts and ceramics belong alongside counselling and medication, it raises a questionto ponder for the rest of us. What would it mean to treat creativity and culture as a critical component of our own health and wellness, rather than just an occasional treat?
Until policies catch up globally, you don’t need a prescription to start adding creative wonder to your health regimen. Consider this your unofficial Rx from me: take one small act of art, regularly, for as long as needed.
Some wonderbringers for me this week:
Creativity is about rebellion, not productivity: Imagination against monetization.
What many Nobel laureates have in common: The hobbies and sidehustles of polymaths.
Another “poorly behaved woman” making history (thanks to reader Mark!): Hortense Daman Clews – Teenage resistance heroine.
Thank you to everyone who took the Wonderbringers survey! I will be notifying via email the three winners of the free, signed copy of The Power of Wonder. I appreciate everyone who took the time to share their thoughts with me. (I’ll keep the survey open until the end of the week in case anyone else wants to take it just out of the goodness of their heart!)
With wonder,
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