Medical Art Psychotherapy in Psychological Medicine

Integrating neuroscience, art psychotherapy, and cultural knowledge systems at the bedside and beyond

Hospital Practice

Isabelle Rizo is a Medical Art Psychotherapist at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, where she works across acute care, the pediatric intensive care unit, neurology, and psychosomatic medicine.

Her clinical work centers on psychosocial assessment through verbal and non-verbal art making, trauma-informed intervention, family support, and existential distress with medically complex pediatric populations. She functions as an integrated member of interdisciplinary care teams — contributing clinical insight at the intersection of medicine, psychology, and cultural context.

She is trained to see what standard biomedical frameworks miss: the symbolic, relational, and cultural dimensions of illness that shape how patients and families experience disease, treatment, and recovery.

Medical Syncretism Framework

Medical Syncretism is Isabelle’s clinical framework for working with multicultural populations in medical settings. Grounded in Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk) — an indigenous epistemological framework developed by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall — medical syncretism holds that biomedical and cultural knowledge systems are not in opposition. They are complementary sources of clinical truth.

In practice, this means assessment and intervention that takes a family’s cultural understanding of illness, their ritual and relational frameworks for healing, and their symbolic language — alongside neurobiological and psychological frameworks. Neither is subordinate to the other.

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