Did you know that a olive harvest can be an excellent mental health support and a therapy for rehabilitation?
Learn more about how this project is being developed by Vittorio Digiacomantonio, a psychiatrist from the Province of Italy.
My name is Vittorio Digiacomantonio. I am a psychiatrist at the Sisters Hospitallers Villa Rosa centre in Viterbo (Italy).
Many practical attempts in Italy and abroad have demonstrated that horticulture can be an excellent therapy for different psychiatric patients.
In 2017, we implemented the Social Horticulture: Crazy Garden project, specifically for the bio-psychosocial rehabilitation of patients with psychotic pathologies, for which around 500 m2 were provided, in addition to a greenhouse and a garden with various fruit and olive trees.
Objectives
The project was designed to maintain and potentially increase our residents’ skills regarding:
– Temporality: finding a rhythm, managing time, developing perspective memory.
– Neurocognition: socio-cognitive skills and executive functions; training, reading, design, and problem-solving.
– Spatial relations: fine motor skills, personal care, food supply chain, cooking, and the final processing of products.
– Relationality: encountering others, sharing, teamwork, relation to nature, circadian rhythms, and the source environment (farmland).
Moreover, in 2020, this general horticultural therapy project was integrated into a new rehabilitation project named Olive Harvest, which consists of the collection of olives to produce extra virgin olive oil.
Development
During the COVID-19 crisis, the Olive Harvest mental health project was restructured into what we call a “closed workgroup”; which entails limiting the guests to only those at the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Units who meet the established criteria of ability, attitude, and psychopathological state of mind. These two groups, consisting of five members each, worked separately to combat the coronavirus.
The participants had previously enjoyed other rehabilitation therapies for some time.
