'Glass Book' Opens Window on Self-injury

Sometimes an idea takes off seemingly on its own. That's the experience Helga Luest, president and CEO of Washington, D.C.-based Witness Justice, has had with the Glass Book Project to raise awareness and understanding of psychological trauma and self-injury.

At a high-school reunion, Luest -- whose group works to raise awareness of the impact of trauma on individuals and society -- ran into her former classmate, Nick Kline, who is a photographer and teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Kline was preparing to teach a class in book arts, and before long, Kline and Luest had thought up a theme for Kline's class: books made of glass on the topic of self-injury.

Luest brought former trauma victims, who had turned to self-injury to cope with their losses, to meet with Kline's students. She also provided them with poems and drawings made by people who had used self-injury to cope with psychological pain. The students incorporated these into their books.

"This was a life-changing experience for many of these students," Luest said. "They learned about trauma and ways people cope, like cutting themselves, addictions and eating disorders, to name a few."

This was an ambitious project for an undergraduate arts class, as glass is a hard material to work with, but in just weeks, the class turned out an amazing collection of books. Luest had them exhibited at a conference for the Center for Mental Health Services, which is part of the U.S. Health and Human Services. The response was tremendous, and the books have been exhibited at conferences and universities.

"People connect with the books right away," Luest said. "They're not white papers or scientific articles. They give people a deep understanding of trauma and how people cope with it."

With a small grant from the Center for Mental Health Services, Luest and Kline are developing a curriculum so that the project can be used at other universities. So far, mental health offices of four states have asked to be involved.

"It's been amazing," Luest said. "We started out at a reunion talking about how we could further social change, and now the exhibit is traveling around and we're going to expand the idea out to other schools. It all happened really quickly."

Photo courtesy of Nick Kline and the Glass Book Project