Origin Story

Arts in Counseling was co-founded in 2025 by Douglas Paulson, a Queens-based professional artist whose community work often functions as social care, and Lindsay Edwards, a Licensed Professional Counselor and Dance/Movement Therapist. They came together through a shared recognition that creativity is essential to health, connection, and meaningful change. Drawing on decades of nonprofit and community-based experience, we observed both the powerful ways artists build trust, invite vulnerability, and foster collective meaning—and the limits artists face when mental health needs or crises arise without clinical support. At the same time, we recognized how traditional mental health systems often fail to reach many people due to stigma, cost, cultural mismatch, or rigid models of care. From this tension emerged a different approach: not asking artists to become therapists, but pairing professional artists with licensed creative arts therapists. Our scaffolded model of care integrates clinical treatment with participatory, community-based creative practice, offering multiple entry points to support and allowing people to move fluidly between clinical and non-clinical care. By embedding artists and clinicians within a single ethical framework, Arts in Counseling expands the mental health ecosystem toward care that is relational, preventative, and community-centered—strengthening both individual wellbeing and the collective conditions that sustain it . . .