Globalization, bringing with it the need to embrace the broad cultural diversity around how personal and societal philosophies interoperate, will put a premium on finding more effective ways to create and share meaning and meaningfulness. We further believe that certain social and environmental factors are converging to thrust the central questions related to better understanding the relationship between art and health into the spotlight of expanded and vigorous attention. Our hope is to expand effective exploration of these concerns. 9 By assessing the use of these processes in clinical and qualitative trials, one can determine how others have found benefit in tying the intricacies of artistic meaning to the complexities of health and wellness. In these forms of expression, arts modalities and creative processes are used during intentional interventions to foster health.
Four primary therapies emerged: music engagement, visual arts therapy, movement-based creative expression, and expressive writing. We reviewed research in the area of art and healing in an effort to determine the creative therapies most often employed. 8 Given the ubiquity of creative expression, as well as the relative ease of engagement, the extent to which psychological and physiological effects are sustainably health enhancing is an important area for public health investigation. Over the past decade, health psychologists have cautiously begun looking at how the arts might be used in a variety of ways to heal emotional injuries, increase understanding of oneself and others, develop a capacity for self-reflection, reduce symptoms, and alter behaviors and thinking patterns.
6, 7 Engagement with creative activities has the potential to contribute toward reducing stress and depression and can serve as a vehicle for alleviating the burden of chronic disease. 3, 4 These diseases are associated with psychosocial difficulties such as depression 5 and chronic stress, contributing to negative cardiovascular outcomes. 2Ĭhronic diseases are a nationwide burden, with cardiovascular disease being the leading cause of death during the past century and the incidence of diabetes continuing to increase, now affecting more than 20 million Americans. More specifically, there is evidence that engagement with artistic activities, either as an observer of the creative efforts of others or as an initiator of one's own creative efforts, can enhance one's moods, emotions, and other psychological states as well as have a salient impact on important physiological parameters. Implied in this definition is the tie to health outcomes or changes in health as a result of an action in the present case, the connection between artistic engagement and the psychosocial and biological manifestations of that connection. This important perspective is echoed in the organization's 1946 preamble, wherein health is defined as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being rather than merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Viewing man in his totality within a wide ecological spectrum, and … emphasizing the view that ill health or disease is brought about by an imbalance, or disequilibrium, of man in his total ecological system and not only by the causative agent and pathogenic evolution. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines holistic health as: There are many more things, between heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.