This article was published in The Daily Advertiser and is republished with permission.
Art therapy was born from the concept that actions speak louder than words. For some people, finding the right words to describe how they feel can be harder than experiencing and expressing the feeling itself.
Grief, trauma, anxiety, shame and even joy do not always arrive as neat sentences. And sometimes we can't quite connect to them in a conscious, digestible way. They might appear as colours, shapes, movement, fragments of memory or images that seem to say something long before we can explain what that something is.
Art therapy offers another way in. It uses creative processes within a therapeutic relationship to explore thoughts, emotions and experiences. A drawing, collage, painting or sculpture can become a way of externalising something difficult, or simply a different route into an experience that words cannot quite reach.
But art therapy is often misunderstood as an art class or simply using art as a tool to boost mental health or a way to take your mind off things by creating something. It is a professional therapeutic practice that combines creative activity with psychological knowledge and clinical skills. Below, we dive into the nitty-gritty of art therapy and explore who can benefit from it.
What is art therapy?
The ANZACATA (Australian, New Zealand and Asian Creative Arts Therapies Association) describes art therapy as a mental health profession involving active art-making, creative processes, psychological theory and human experience within a psychotherapeutic relationship.
For students in Australia exploring psychology courses, counselling or allied health careers, art therapy offers an interesting example of how different therapeutic disciplines can intersect.
Creating art can certainly be relaxing, absorbing or emotionally rewarding. But doing something creative doesn't automatically make it art therapy. Professional arts therapists are trained to use creative processes deliberately within a therapeutic context, with attention to ethics, clinical boundaries and the needs of the individual.
That means creating the artwork itself is not the answer. Therapists won't look at a child's drawing, for example, and immediately declare that a particular colour or shape proves something about their psychological state.
Instead, it's much more powerful when the artwork is explored collaboratively. What does the person see in it? How did they feel while making it? Why did they choose particular materials? Did anything surprise them during the process? The meaning belongs to the client as much as the therapist.
How does art therapy work?
A very compelling idea behind bringing together art and therapy is that human experience isn't exclusively verbal. Think about trying to describe a complicated dream. You may remember the atmosphere perfectly but struggle to explain it. Or consider an experience that happened years ago. It's likely you might know exactly how it felt without having a clear narrative for it. Creative expression can provide another channel.
During an art therapy session, a therapist might invite someone to draw, paint, create a collage, work with clay or use another suitable medium. The activity may be relatively open-ended, or it may be structured around a particular therapeutic goal. The process can then become part of the therapeutic conversation.
A client might notice that making an image brought up an unexpected emotion, or someone dealing with grief could create something representing a relationship that has changed. There is no focus on the quality of an artwork at all; instead, the focus is on what happens during creation and how the client relates to the experience and final piece afterwards.
What happens in an art therapy session?
There is no single art therapy formula. Sessions might begin with an ordinary conversation about how the client has been feeling. The therapist may then introduce a creative activity, perhaps asking the person to create an image representing a particular emotion or experience. The client creates while the therapist provides support and observes the therapeutic process. Afterwards, they may discuss the artwork together.
The therapist's goal is never to interpret the picture from the outside; a red mark isn't automatically anger, and a house isn't necessarily a representation of childhood. Symbols can have completely different meanings from one person to another. The therapist might ask questions to explore what each part means to the client and what was happening when they made it.
Some approaches emphasise the creative process itself, sometimes described as 'art as therapy', while others place greater emphasis on exploring the meaning and content of the artwork, sometimes referred to as 'art in therapy'. In practice, therapists may draw from different theoretical approaches depending on their training and the needs of the client.
Who can benefit from art therapy?
Firstly, neither clients nor therapists need to be skilled in art. Art therapists can work with individuals, families and groups in settings including hospitals, schools, rehabilitation facilities, community health services, mental health facilities, aged care, palliative care and private practice.
Since it helps us make sense of experiences that we can't easily connect with, it can be particularly valuable for people who struggle to articulate emotions verbally. For children, people with developmental or cognitive conditions, or individuals dealing with overwhelming experiences, creative expression may offer an accessible alternative or complement to conventional conversation.
It's also known to be suitable for people experiencing grief, individuals recovering from trauma, people with disabilities or developmental conditions and those who find conventional talk-based approaches difficult.
There are also more everyday therapeutic goals. Someone might use arts therapy to develop healthier coping strategies, improve self-esteem, explore emotional expression, build communication skills or increase their awareness of patterns in their behaviour and relationships.
For others, the attraction is simply that sitting down and making something creates enough psychological distance to approach a difficult subject differently. That doesn't mean art therapy is universally appropriate or automatically effective. As with any therapeutic intervention, the approach needs to be matched to the individual and delivered by an appropriately trained professional.
Is art therapy evidence-based?
The evidence surrounding art therapy is promising, but it deserves a nuanced explanation. Research has identified positive outcomes across a range of populations and mental health concerns.
A review discussed by the Australian Psychological Society found significant positive changes in mental health symptoms in 10 of 15 randomised controlled trials examining art therapy for non-psychotic mental health disorders. However, the researchers also highlighted considerable differences between studies, making it difficult to combine their results into a single meta-analysis.
More recent research has similarly suggested that art therapy can be useful as an adjunct to established psychological interventions. For example, art therapy can be combined with cognitive behavioural approaches. A client might create a visual representation of a recurring thought or difficult situation, then use CBT techniques to identify, challenge and reframe the underlying beliefs.
A different way into the conversation
Art therapy's strength lies in its subtle connection to the subconscious. For some people, a blank page can make a difficult thought visible, clay can give physical form to an emotion or a collage can bring disconnected memories into the same space.
Ultimately, art therapy is not concerned with the artwork, or at least, not the quality of it. It cares about using what comes out to create another pathway into human experience. For people who struggle to find the right words, that pathway can be surprisingly powerful for improving their mental health.