Hospitals and care homes in Montreal get ready! The therapy clowns are back in town! Shades of Patch Adams! A project of the Dr. Clown Foundation, the therapy clowns, equipped with their clown make-up and trademark red noses, are returning to hospital children’s wards and long-term care homes to continue their mission of providing therapeutic entertainment to its many patients and residents after more than a year in hiatus thanks to the COVID pandemic, when their work was deemed as non-essential by health institutions in the city.
Melissa Holland, a co-founder of the Dr. Clown Foundation, strongly believes that there is so much more to therapy clowning than just putting on make-up and a costume and doing goofy things to make people laugh when they need it the most.
In a recent interview on the CBC Montreal program Let’s Go, she told host Sabrina Marandola “I think the profession itself hinges on a lot of listening. That includes being able to listen to yourself as well as being able to listen to patients in a deep way.”
Ms. Holland does her therapy clowning in the guise of two characters that she developed and created: Cherie Labelle and Dr. Fifi.
And returning to entertain on the hospital wards and residences means new challenges to their jobs as a result of the pandemic. According to a report by CBC News, that means the clowns have to wear masks. The end result of that new measure, the clowns now have to rely on expressing their brand of silliness using their eyes and body language, when they would normally use facial expressions.
How much of an impact that the work of the therapy clowns has on the patients and residents that they reach out to? Just ask Joy Gandell, whose daughter benefitted greatly from what they had to offer while she was going through intense chemotherapy treatments that lasted for 10 months.
“They show that it’s okay to be happy at a dark time in our lives,” Ms. Gandell told CBC News. “I will forever be grateful for what they did that first day that we met them.” She added that the clowns’ appearances made her laugh instantly at a time when it was difficult for her to smile.
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