Art and Mental Health: Application and Effectiveness of Art Healing

Abstract

Mental health is fundamental to an individual's general well-being and ability to work effectively. A trial carried out on college/university students in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province showed that the mental health of college students could be improved by art healing. The changes in the scores of SCL-90 before and after the trial can be seen that the experimental group had a significant improvement in total score from pre-intervention to post-intervention. For the specific factor items, the anxiety, hostility and additional items were more significant improvements, however, phobia anxiety, paranoid ideation and psychoticism did not show significant differences between pre-intervention and post-intervention. Overall, close to half of the students showed a significant difference in their mental health compared to the pre-trial, and this treatment effect was more pronounced for students with mental health issues. Female students, on the other hand, demonstrated a more positive healing effect than male students. The students in the experimental group showed a reduction in positive psychological symptoms after the art therapy intervention, but did not yet show “effective” results in terms of grade reduction rates. Therefore, a long-term, larger-scale, and more comprehensively designed follow-up trial is necessary to improve the mental health of college students.