[LAUIL601] Secondary Research: Academic Journal - Effectiveness of Art Therapy With Adult Clients in 2018 - What Progress Has Been Made?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6124538/

Regev, D., & Cohen-Yatziv, L. (2018). Effectiveness of Art Therapy With Adult Clients in 2018-What Progress Has Been Made?. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1531. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01531

• In the year 2000, an important art therapy literature review addressed an essential question—does art therapy work? It discussed 17 articles dealing with the issue of the effectiveness of art therapy. Two decades later, this research field has extended its scope and is flourishing.

•  The aim of this systematic literature review is to contribute to the ongoing discussion in the field by exploring the latest studies dealing with the effectiveness of art therapy with a broad scope of adult clients. 

• It underscores the potential effects of art therapy on these seven clinical populations, and recommends the necessary expansions for future research in the field, to enable art therapy research to take further strides forward.

• In 1999, nearly two decades ago, the American Art Therapy Association (AATA) (1999) issued a mission statement that outlined the organization's commitment to research, defined the preferential topics for this research, and suggested future research directions in the field. One year later, Reynolds et al. (2000) published a review of studies that addressed the therapeutic effectiveness of art therapy. They included studies that differed in terms of research quality and standards.

• 'The accumulated results of the studies in this category suggest that further research is needed to assess the effectiveness of interventions in art therapy for clients dealing with mental health issues.'

• 'The fourth category included art therapy with clients coping with trauma (see Table ​Table4).4). In this category, two studies have been conducted since 2004, both with randomization (level 1). The first study (Pizarro, 2004) was composed of a sample of 45 students who participated in two art therapy sessions. These students had dealt with a traumatic event, which could occur at different levels of intensity and at various stages in their lives. In addition, the comparison was made between an art-therapy group and two comparison groups where one underwent writing therapy and the other experimented with artwork, regardless of the traumatic event. Despite the attempt to use a wide range of indices, including symptom reporting and emotional and health assessments, and perhaps because of the short duration of therapy, this study failed to find significant results.'

• The second study (Kopytin and Lebedev, 2013) examined a sample of 112 war veterans who participated in 12–14 art therapy sessions. In this study, in which the definition of the traumatic event was more specific and defined by involvement in war, an attempt was also made to measure the level of improvement through a wide range of research indices, including reports of symptoms, emotional state, and quality of life. For some of the indices, there was a significant improvement compared to the control group.

• These two articles thus present an inconsistent picture of the beneficial effects of this intervention, which may depend on the indices measured, the duration of therapy, and possibly the type of traumatic event.