In One Swiss Town, Art Is (Free) Medicine

The world's got you down? Burnout at work? Need a little something extra to fight illness? As the AP reports, the Swiss town of Neuchâtel is offering its residents a novel medical option: Expose yourself to art and get a doctor's note to do it for free. Under a new two-year pilot project, authorities are covering the costs of "museum prescriptions" issued by doctors who believe their patients could benefit from visits to any of the town's four museums as part of their treatment. The project is based on a 2019 World Health Organization report that found the arts can boost mental health, reduce the impact of trauma, and lower the risk of cognitive decline, frailty, and "premature mortality," among other upsides.

Art can help relax the mind—as a sort of preventative medicine—and visits to museums require getting up and out of the house with physical activity like walking and standing for long periods. Neuchâtel council member Julie Courcier Delafontaine said COVID also played a role in the program's genesis. "With the closure of cultural sites (during lockdowns), people realized just how much we need them to feel better." She said so far some 500 prescriptions have been distributed to doctors around town and the program costs "very little." About $11,300 has been budgeted.

If successful, local officials could expand the program to other artistic activities like theater or dance, Courcier Delafontaine said. The Swiss national health care system doesn't cover "culture as a means of therapy," but she hopes it might one day. Marianne de Reynier Nevsky, who helped devise the program in the town of 46,000, said it built on a similar idea rolled out at the Fine Arts Museum in Montreal in 2019.

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She said many types of patients could benefit. "It could be a person with depression, a person who has trouble walking, a person with a chronic illness," she says. Dr. Marc-Olivier Sauvain, head of surgery at the Neuchâtel Hospital Network, adds, "It's really nice to prescribe museum visits rather than medicines or tests that patients don't enjoy. To tell them, 'It's a medical order that instructs you to go visit one of our nice city museums.'" (More museums stories.)