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Answer these questions to test your understanding of  Art and Mental Health.

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“I function when I’m painting”- The Arts in Psychotherapy

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“I function when I’m painting”- The Arts in Psychotherapy

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This article is talking about using traditional and non traditional  art to manage mental illness in Fiji. The research was conducted on people between the ages of 20’s to 30’s and this research had a positive outcome as the Fijians responded well to the programme.
Reference:
Sciencedirect.com. (2020). The Arts in Psychotherapy | Journal | ScienceDirect.com. [online] Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/the-arts-in-psychotherapy [Accessed 14 Jan. 2020].

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About the journal

The Arts in Psychotherapy is a dynamic, contemporary journal publishing evidence-based research, expert opinion, theoretical positions, and case material on a wide range of topics intersecting the fields of mental health and creative arts therapies. It is an international peer-reviewed journal publishing 5 issues annually. Papers are welcomed from researchers and practitioners in the fields of art, dance/movement, drama, music, and poetry psychotherapy, as well as expressive and creative arts therapy, neuroscience, psychiatry, education, allied health, and psychology that aim to engage high level theoretical concepts with the rigor of professional practice. The journal welcomes contributions that present new and emergent knowledge about the role of the arts in healthcare, and engage a critical discourse relevant to an international readership that can inform the development of new services and the refinement of existing policies and practices. There is no restriction on research methods and review papers are welcome. From time to time the journal publishes special issues on topics warranting a distinctive focus relevant to the stated goals and scope of the publication.

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The Arts in Psychotherapy is a dynamic, contemporary journal publishing evidence-based research, expert opinion, theoretical positions, and case material on a wide range of topics intersecting the fields of mental health and creative arts therapies. It is an international peer-reviewed journal ...

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Jason Butler, PhD

Lesley University, 2138, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America

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Edited by Savneet Talwar, Nisha Sajnani

Edited by Alisha Ali, Craig Haen

Edited by Nisha Sajnani, Frances Kaplan

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The Arts in Psychotherapy is a dynamic, contemporary journal publishing evidence-based research, expert opinion, theoretical positions, and case material on a wide range of topics intersecting the fields of mental health and creative arts therapies. It is an international peer-reviewed journal publishing 5 issues annually.

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BLACK = Need to know ppt
ORANGE = Quiz
RED = NTU sources
BLUE = Videos
PURPLE = Articles

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''Promoting Healing with Therapeutic Use of Clay'' (NTU article)

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''Promoting Healing with Therapeutic Use of Clay'' (NTU article)

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Alice McCall Smith shares her experience as an occupational therapist and artist based in North Carolina talking about how she was diagnosed with depression and later on turned to sculpting as a way of coping with her emotions.

References:
Fortuna, J. (2019). Promoting Healing with Therapeutic Use of Clay. The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy, 7(3), pp.1–6. doi:10.15453/2168-6408.1646.

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llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com. (n.d.). https://llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=cdi_doaj_primary_oai_doaj_org_article_05aaa99611664a79a02d71d849265778&context=PC&vid=44NTU_INST:NTU_VU9&lang=en&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&adaptor=Primo%2520Central&tab=Everything&query=any. [online] Available at: https://llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=cdi_doaj_primary_oai_doaj_org_article_05aaa99611664a79a02d71d849265778&context=PC&vid=44NTU_INST:NTU_VU9&lang=en&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&adaptor=Primo%20Central&tab=Everything&query=any [Accessed 12 Jan. 2023].

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Dr. Kimberley Palmiotto, is a therapist who uses expressive therapies ranging from music to drama to art, to help children and teenagers deal with mental health issues such as Autism, Anxiety and ADHD.
This form of therapy enables the patients to express their emotions and find solutions to them without feeling judged.

Reference
llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com. (n.d.). https://llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?&context=L&vid=44NTU_INST:NTU_VU10&search_scope=MyInstitution&tab=ntu10local&docid=alma990014166160107181. [online] Available at: https://llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/44NTU_INST/1mqln2/alma990014166160107181 [Accessed 12 Jan. 2023].

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The Oxford handbook of dance and wellbeing(NTU)

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The Oxford handbook of dance and wellbeing(NTU)

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This books explores perspectives of dance and its effects on wellbeing. It focuses on experience of bodily wellbeing through movement and dance. The book refers to anatomical, physiological and neuroscientific aspects to movement and dance. It considers how audiences, performers, choreographers and directors can understand and share experiences of wellbeing.

Reference:
llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com. (n.d.). https://llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?&context=L&vid=44NTU_INST:NTU_VU10&search_scope=MyInstitution&tab=ntu10local&docid=alma9917672375507181. [online] Available at: https://llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/44NTU_INST/1mqln2/alma9917672375507181 [Accessed 12 Jan. 2023].

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''The enduring connection between art and mental health'' By Rosemary Waugh

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''The enduring connection between art and mental health'' By Rosemary Waugh

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This article talks about how artists have used their traumas and suffering as an inspiration for their art. For centuries art has been a way of self-expression although it has always been something shamed on, for someone to be struggling with mental issues.

The artists that have been mentioned are:
- Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
- Edvard Munch (1863–1944)
- Tracey Emin (b.1963)
- Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946)
- Louis Wain (1860–1939)
- Charlotte Johnson Wahl (1942–2021)
- Olivia Gillow (b.1972)
- Elise J. M. Pacquette (b.1968)

Reference:
Waugh, R. (2020). The enduring connection between art and mental health | Art UK. [online] artuk.org. Available at: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/the-enduring-connection-between-art-and-mental-health.

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Depression, anxiety, angst, grief and loneliness: despite its frequent occurrence in people's lives and attempts to destigmatise mental health, we still find it difficult to discuss psychological distress.

Yet for centuries, the darker and more complex parts of our psyches - from generalised low spirits to diagnosable mental health conditions - have served as an inspiration to artists who have depicted these very human experiences with sensitivity, nuance and empathy.

The mythologising of the 'mad' artist is particularly associated with Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) who famously mutilated his own ear following a fight with the artist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and sent the remnants to Gabrielle Berlatier, who was working as a maid in a brothel at the time.

Van Gogh's own chronicling of the incident's aftermath in Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889) has helped cement the now-legendary incident as a prime example of mental instability and artistic genius. But even the painting itself is a bit of an enigma: the piercing stare and visible injury suggest great pain, but the calmly applied vertical paint strokes and carefully outlined shapes nod to focus, maybe even calmness. It's also difficult to argue that bodily mutilation and self-harm is ever something to celebrate, even when tied to great works of art.

Alongside Van Gogh, one of the most famous artists to portray mental suffering - loss, loneliness and fear included - was Edvard Munch (1863-1944).

The Scream

The Norwegian's artworks consistently and vividly drew on emotional turmoil and trauma. For example, his 1907 painting The Sick Child - a theme he revisited several times - is inspired by the death of his sister Sophie from tuberculosis when Munch was just 14 years old.

The painting's title, and its haunting inclusion of an unidentifiable maternal figure bent over in grief, make the emotions underpinning the scene seem as much universal as autobiographical. This ability to use deeply personal experiences of mental anguish to create an artwork suggestive of collective suffering is seen repeatedly in Munch's work.

Anxiety, an 1894 painting containing several stylistic and thematic overlaps with Munch's iconic The Scream, shows a crowd of dark-costumed people congregated by the Oslo Fjord.

Anxiety

The vacant stares, unhealthy pallor and tense facial expressions of the three characters in the painting's foreground evoke a sense of great agitation, while the sinuous and near-apocalyptic skyline suggests their unease is echoed - and perhaps caused by - the world surrounding them.

The raw emotional truth of Munch's work has been a long-running inspiration to contemporary artist Tracey Emin (b.1963). As the upcoming exhibition ' Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul' demonstrates (due to be on display at the Royal Academy from 15th November 2020 to 28th February 2021, although now postponed due to COVID-19), Munch's influence is detectable in multifarious aspects of Emin's output - for example, the acutely vulnerable nude female figures seen crouched or curved into semi-foetal positions, as in Trying to Find You 1.

Emin also explicitly stated her debt to the Norwegian painter with the painfully emotional short film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children. Recorded in 1998 outside Munch's cottage in Åsgårdstrand, the piece shows Emin literally giving voice to the screech of pain captured in Munch's most famous painting. But the most enduring link between the two artists lies in a shared commitment to revealing unfiltered mental suffering - in Emin's case often linked to depression, grief, sexual assault or deeply traumatic experiences of abortion.

Homage to Edvard Munch and all my dead children - Tracey Emin
Haftanın Eseri https://t.co/cfI3TOvvTa pic.twitter.com/UxbbSiym6h
- Diken (@DikenComTr) October 26, 2019

Emotional distress is a long-running theme in Emin's art. Her 1998 installation My Bed (first shown at the Tate Gallery in 1999) recreated a brutally personal bedroom scene showing a dishevelled bed surrounded by items such as discarded tights, cigarettes and used condoms.

My Bed captures the material aftermath of four days Emin spent in bed suffering from suicidal depression. The emotional vulnerability of the work is, in many ways, at odds with its initial critical reception as a controversy-seeking artwork reliant on shock value. The legacy of My Bed in Emin's work can be seen both in the recurrent motif of beds in her art and in the continued blend of self-confession and domestic materials, for instance, a cream and soft pink applique blanket incorporating the title words It Always Hurts (2005).

While the links between Munch and Emin become clearer with deliberate study, the connection between Munch and another artist is more overt. Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946) shared Munch's gift for producing images saturated with solitude, introspection and existential angst. For Spilliaert - who saw his paintings exhibited alongside Munch's - psychological pain overlapped with physical discomfort. Plagued by stomach ulcers, the Belgian artist would often rise before dawn with insomnia and walk the dark Ostend seafront, the scene of many of his paintings.

In The Gust of Wind (1904), a lone female figure is pictured against a dusky sky, her mouth open in a penetrating howl. Often imagined as a location of sunshine and joy, for Spilliaert the coast was the site of lonely figures pitted against elemental forces.

The Gust of Wind

Yet while the connection between an artist's work and their mental state might seem immediately apparent, caution is always required. The interlacing of creativity with mental health conditions is both contested - no medical study has ever proven a definitive link - and, moreover, risks glamorising or mythologising suffering. We can also overly simplify an artist's work by suggesting their creative output is only the product of a troubled mind.

For example, in the case of Louis Wain (1860-1939), an artist known for his popular drawings of anthropomorphised cats, his precise mental health condition was never identified, though it is generally believed that Wain had undiagnosed schizophrenia. The artist spent a considerable amount of time as an in-patient and received his generation's version of 'mental health care'.

In the later stages of his career, Wain produced a series of 'psychedelic cats' such as A Cat Standing on Its Hind Legs, Formed by Patterns Supposed to Be in the 'Early Greek' Style.

This switch from the traditional to the vibrantly abstract has been interpreted as both symptom and proof of Wain's suspected schizophrenia, though such interpretations - read through the lens of mental illness - can prevent us from fully exploring Wain's artistic merits. For instance, his move towards abstraction followed his increased interest in avant-garde artistic styles, seen in a series of ceramic cats inspired by Futurism.

Where other artists are concerned, the connection between their own mental health conditions and their creations is more certain. Ask and Get No Reassurance by Charlotte Johnson Wahl (b.1943) chronicles a form of exposure therapy the artist received as an inpatient at the Maudsley Hospital in the early 1970s. The unsettling image reveals that what the artist most desired was simple confirmation that everything would be OK.

Like many artists in the Bethlem Museum of the Mind collection, Johnson Wahl's artworks created while receiving care can be considered a form of art therapy. Yet Johnson Wahl was also a professional artist before and after undergoing treatment, making painting a natural method of self-expression.

Olivia Gillow (b.1972) has also drawn on her experiences of hospitalisation for mental health reasons. However, instead of representing her own condition, Gillow's 2001 painting Cradle Soap 1 is inspired by the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) the artist witnessed other patients experiencing on the same ward. The loving caress of the hands around the soap, and the 'cradle' of the title, inject a disconcerting note of tenderness into a visceral image of compulsion and suffering.

A similar blend of pain and care is also detectable in Protecting the Heart by Elise J. M. Pacquette (b.1968). One of many works by Pacquette exploring the artist's first-hand experience of anorexia nervosa, the image combines knowledge of the physical strain the condition has on the body with the desire to nurture and heal.

Pacquette's art acts as a window into the lived experience of a mental health condition. This lends it the ability to engender empathy from those without similar experiences, solace for those who do and - as with many of the artworks discussed above - a surprising and poignant note of hope.
Rosemary Waugh, art critic and journalist

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The enduring connection between art and mental health | Art UK

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Depression, anxiety, angst, grief and loneliness: despite its frequent occurrence in people's lives and attempts to destigmatise mental health, we still find it difficult to discuss psychological distress. Yet for centuries, the darker and more complex parts of our psyches - from generalised low spirits to diagnosable mental health conditions - have served as an inspiration to artists who have depicted these very human experiences with sensitivity, nuance and empathy.

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Breakthrough: Art, Analysis & the Liberation of the Creative Spirit(NTU)

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Breakthrough: Art, Analysis & the Liberation of the Creative Spirit(NTU)

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This film, sponsored by the Lucy Daniels Foundation, captures the intimate experience of eight artists who have had psychoanalytic treatment. The film also demonstrates the growth and freedom made possible by facing the pain that both psychoanalysis and creation bring into awareness. The artists presented in BREAKTHROUGH had found themselves held back in their lives and work because of traumatic events and unresolved emotional issues from the past. The film shows how the combination of analytic therapy and creative work liberated them. Rather than dulling an artist's creative edge, analysis facilitates personal growth and creative freedom.

Reference:
llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com. (n.d.). https://llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?&context=L&vid=44NTU_INST:NTU_VU10&search_scope=MyInstitution&tab=ntu10local&docid=alma990011019670107181. [online] Available at: https://llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/44NTU_INST/1mqln2/alma990011019670107181 [Accessed 11 Jan. 2023].

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Arts Therapies in Schools: Research and Practice (NTU)

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Arts Therapies in Schools: Research and Practice (NTU)

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This book highlights the use of art therapy in schools ranging from mainstream schools to special schools. It shows therapeutic art used in mainstream schools to help children that have have suffered trauma such as loss, bullying, abuse and neglect. The book also looks at special needs schools that provide this therapy to students with autism, cerebral palsy and developmental difficulties.

Reference:
llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com. (n.d.). https://llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?&context=L&vid=44NTU_INST:NTU_VU10&search_scope=MyInstitution&tab=ntu10local&docid=alma9917606079707181. [online] Available at: https://llr.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/44NTU_INST/1mqln2/alma9917606079707181 [Accessed 11 Jan. 2023].

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This short interview explains how art can help many people that struggle with depression and anxiety by ''distracting'' them although a distraction doesn't solve the problem, in this case, it does!

When thinking about depression and anxiety, the person falls into a pattern or stage in their life that they cannot escape.
And during this time, they struggle heavily with self-confidence.

But through art, they can pick themselves up and get a sense of control back into their lives.
That is one major step toward healing and solving their problems, it may not seem like it but with constant care and a support group eventually, they will reach a point of security.

Reference:
Art and craft ‘helps my anxiety’. (n.d.). BBC News. [online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-devon-41526940  [Accessed 11 Jan. 2023].

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A craft group is bringing people together to help tackle their mental health issues.

Debbie and Charlie Seldon, from Devon, started the group after Debbie found that craft helped her manage her anxiety.

They say being distracted by making something can have a range of benefits.

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A craft group is bringing people together to help tackle their mental health issues. Debbie and Charlie Seldon, from Devon, started the group after Debbie found that craft helped her manage her anxiety. They say being distracted by making something can have a range of benefits.

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Sonaksha Iyengar tells her story of how she suffered from anxiety and depression but felt ashamed because she had a 'perfect' life, as others may see it, good grades and a loving family. However, all these were still not enough to give her happiness.
To combat these emotions and what she was going through, she turned to art which provided a space to express herself without words.
In doing artwork and drawings, she found a voice; through this, she felt like her feelings were valid and made her daily existence a bit easier.

Reference
TEDx Talks (n.d.). Art and mental illness: How I created my garden of kindness | Sonaksha Iyengar | TEDxEMWS. [YouTube Video] Available at: https://youtu.be/05SP8I96HQo

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Art and mental illness: How I created my garden of kindness | Sonaksha Iyengar | TEDxEMWS