- Is there scientific evidence that art helps people's emotional well-being and mental health?
- What kind of improvements can the arts bring to the mental health of our students?
- How can an introduction to the museum institution help students?
- How can art be used to work on accepting emotions such as anger or fear?
- The pandemic has increased the number of students with anxiety and depression. How can we help them through art?
- Can art help manage symptoms such as obsessions and compulsions?
- What type of artistic activities are most recommended for students with specific educational support needs?
- How can spirituality be explored through art?
- What kind of artistic activities can be done in the classroom?
- When working with teenagers, can audiovisual languages such as short films or music videos also help us?
- How can we use music to work on emotions with students?
- How can we use theatre to improve mental health?
- We want to do a collaborative art activity between our students and people with mental health problems to address the stigma. Where do we start? What can we do?
Is there scientific evidence that art helps people's emotional well-being and mental health?
As in other disciplines, the impact of the arts and artistic methodologies on the physical and emotional well-being of people is the subject of constant observation by the field of research, especially in a context where the verification of scientific evidence implies its endorsement for its possible recommendation or social therapeutic prescription.
There is an increasing number of empirical studies whose results confirm and assume the impact of artistic disciplines as catalysts or facilitators of improvement in areas such as health, for example, in the field of oncology, fibromyalgia or mental health, or in the field of working with special groups, to name just a few examples.
From the perspective of scientific rigor applicable to other types of trials, we could question whether many published studies still exhibit methodological shortcomings, such as the diversity of uncontrolled variables, the difficulty of replicability, the lack of blinded groups, or the small sample sizes, which statistically limits the significance of the results. These are certainly areas where further progress is needed. Nevertheless, despite these methodological limitations, there is empirical evidence that implicitly supports the recognition of this research.
We'll give two examples:
The impact of physical and social activity on people's emotional well-being and its social prescription, although still in its early stages, is recognized and already forms part of the key objectives of our healthcare system, following the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) . These recommendations are explicitly extended by the WHO to the use and promotion of the arts and artistic activities.
New developments in neuroscience and neuroimaging have facilitated major scientific advances that bring us closer than ever before to understanding how our brain works, and with it, our mental and emotional well-being. Thousands of rigorous scientific studies have demonstrated, for example, the evidence of brain plasticity and how neural structures are transformed by new learning.
