chusetts General Hospital and an assistant profes-
sor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “It’s a
way for us to express the inner workings of our own
mind, so we can process them and find healing. And
it’s a way for us to find a connection, both with other
humans and with the world at large.”
Increasingly, research also shows that it’s an ef-
fective way to deal with stress. People who make a
single work of art experience significant reductions
in levels of the stress hormone cortisol, according to
a Drexel University study published in 2016 in the
journal Art Therapy. Researchers had 39 adults be-
tween the ages of 18 and 59 create an art project from
either clay, felt markers or collage materials. Their sa-
liva was swabbed immediately before and after the
45-minute session. The result: almost three quarters
had lower cortisol levels at the end. “What was partic-
ularly important about the study was it didn’t seem to
matter whether or not subjects
had previous art experience—
everyone seemed to get just
about the same level of benefit,”
explains Cathy Malchiodi, di-
rector of the Trauma-Informed
Practices and Expressive Arts
Therapy Institute in Louisville,
Ky. There’s even some prelim-
inary evidence to suggest that
art therapy can help with mood
disorders such as depression.
One 2017 study done at the Uni-
versity of Gothenburg in Sweden found that subjects
with severe depression who underwent 10 hour-long
treatment sessions in which they created a picture of
how they were feeling with watercolors or crayons
showed significant improvement in their symptoms
compared with a control group.
HOW ART HEALS
it’s something we instinctiveLy know as
kids: whether it’s creating a lopsided animal with
Play-Doh or destroying walls with finger paint, art
in all its messy stages can be truly therapeutic. “Art
forces you to tap into the right side of the brain,
which is in charge of emotions and creativity,” ex-
plains Susan Albers, a psychologist at the Cleve-
land Clinic. “We spend most of our days using our
left brain, which focuses on words and worries and
thinking things through. As a result, diving into the
right brain is almost like a vacation for your mind.”
There’s another key reason art relaxes: it pro-
motes mindfulness, which in turn reduces levels of
stress hormones. “When you’re forced to be pres-
ent in the moment, it really slows your entire body
down,” Schlozman explains. “Your heart rate, your
blood pressure, even your breathing.”
Enter art therapy, a hybrid field that combines
art and psychology. Its goal is to help patients de-
velop self-awareness and explore their emotions,
Malchiodi says. The term itself was coined in 1942
by English artist and writer Adrian Hill, who discov-
ered that activities such as drawing and painting low-
ered stress levels among tuberculosis patients. Since
then, art has been used to treat people with condi-
tions as diverse as cancer and PTSD. “People can
more authentically express what is going on inside
of them through art,” explains David Puder, a psy-
chiatrist at Loma Linda University Behavioral Medi-
cine Center in Yucaipa, Calif. “So
many of us have psychological
defenses that make it hard to ex-
press things verbally. But by cre-
ating something, they can relive
an experience or convey an emo-
tion that they might not be able to
talk about with a therapist.”
One 2015 study funded by
the National Institutes of Health
found that art therapy helped al-
leviate anxiety and depression
among cancer patients. And a
2016 review published in the Journal of Military and
Veterans Health concluded that war veterans with
PTSD who received some type of art therapy expe-
rienced a significant reduction in symptoms. “When
cancer patients come into my classroom, they’re a
little hesitant, but once they get in here, it’s truly
amazing what happens,” says Cheri Hunt, an art in-
structor at LivingWell Cancer Resource Center at the
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medi-
cine in Chicago. “They’re working in a medium that
they’re not used to, and it lets them let go of worry
and allows them to find some self-reflection and ex-
press their inner feelings and thoughts.”
A structured art therapy session itself—either
group or individual—usually starts with participants
checking in with their therapist to provide a baseline
of how they’re feeling. They then perform the cho-
sen activity, which can be anything from painting to
sculpting to making collages. The session wraps upCreating art
promotes
mindfulness, which
in turn reduces
levels of stress
hormones.