Therapeutic Humor

RX Laughter is a website I learned about on the “Organizational Friends” listings page of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor website.

According to their website, “Rx Laughter is a humor research, therapeutic and educational nonprofit charity that creates and implements projects that advance the emotional and physical health of children and adults who are battling serious illnesses and trauma.”

I especially liked this statement on their website: “Rx Laughter is not about laughing as a cure-all. We are about using positive humor to help you and others through rough times. In all of our projects, our goal for you remains constant: To bring humor into your lives to offer immediate relief from suffering while nurturing an overall positive, humorous perspective so that you can continue to cope with issues that might otherwise feel insurmountable. However, each person has their own unique way of actually doing this. There is no "one size fits all" way.”

It was heart-warming to read their April press release which stated that “The UCLA Nathanson Family Resilience Center and the nonprofit Rx Laughter are teaming up with the legendary Second City Training Center to offer an innovative, humor-based project that uses improvisational comedy techniques to help military families deal with the traumatic effects of war.  

During the free two-hour workshop, which will be held at UCLA for military parents and their children on April 22, participants will learn the basic principles of improvisation to enhance family communication, reduce stress and promote family togetherness.”

Interested? Here’s a link to their bare bones website:  http://www.rxlaughter.org/index.htm

And here is a link to the AATH Organizational Friends Listing: http://www.aath.org/aath-organizational-friends-listing

Humor Cures…or at least makes you laugh

Yesterday I spent several hours reading brain tumor blogs of all sorts of different shapes, sizes and concerns.

Strangely enough, one constant theme that appeared in many of my favorite blogs was humor.  It could be silly humor, crazy humor, gallows humor, black humor, blue humor (i.e. lots of swearing) or any other color of humor you can imagine..

Sometimes blogsters talked about brain tumors as being “funny”, like Cancer is SO FUNNY by Amy Marash (http://cancerissofunny.blogspot.com/),  or funny as in Funnycancershirts.com (http://www.funnycancershirts.com/)  by Ryan Armbrust, but to me these are all playing in the same emotional sandbox.

Is laughing good for those of us battling brain tumors?

Well Joni Gatz-Bauma, my new-found Brain Store buddy just introduced me to a bunch of organizations that not only believe humor is therapeutic, they promote humor as therapy.  How can you tell? Just visit their websites. For starters check out the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (http://www.aath.org/). (Their website looks to be in the middle of a major surgery itself, so be warned that there’s a number of pages that aren’t fully operational.)

Of course instead of being happy, I’m now honked off that I missed their annual conference which was right here in Chicago in April (their 2013 conference is in San Diego).

On the AATH site there’s also a list of organizational “friends” on their website that seem to buy into this idea, from Caring Clowns International to Cancer Treatment Centers of America.  See http://www.aath.org/aath-organizational-friends-listing

My next posting will feature a youtube.com video from the AATH annual conference of funny nurses. Wait, that doesn’t sound exactly right.  I mean nurses who find their jobs funny.  Umm, maybe I should say its nurses who find their patients funny. No, that sounds rather cruel.  Ok, just look for my next post and make up your own mind.