Art therapy Spot of Monet? Just what the doctor ordered

It was more than six years ago that Nathalie Bondil heard of doctors prescribing outside the boundaries of traditional medicine, scribbling out orders to walk, cycle or swim or sending their patients into nature.

- Ashifa Kassam

It was more than six years ago that Nathalie Bondil heard of doctors prescribing outside the boundaries of traditional medicine, scribbling out orders to walk, cycle or swim or sending their patients into nature. As she made her way through Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts, however, she was certain that its collection of Inuit art, or paintings by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro could also be just what the doctor ordered.

"The museum is such a special place, it's an escape from our stressful daily life," said Bondil, who at the time was the museum's director general. "And art is something that is interesting to the brain."

Her resolve gave rise to what was billed as a world first – a pilot programme in which thousands of doctors in Montreal were given free passes to prescribe to patients in the hopes of alleviating everything from depression and anxiety to diabetes and high blood pressure.

Years after the pandemic sharpened issues around mental health, the practice has boomed, with doctors prescribing visits to museums from Montpellier to Massachusetts as a compliment to more traditional treatments.

Earlier this year doctors in the Swiss town of Neuchâtel became the latest to start handing out passes to their patients to peruse either museums or the city's botanical gardens.