Page 142 - ART FORM AND MENTAL HEALTH - Ingrid Pénzes

3. Formal elements of the art product and mental health
The need to focus also concerns the relation between formal elements and mental health. Not only is the number of diagnostic cues in the art form huge, but the same holds true for mental health; the number of approaches of health, as well as the number of health concepts, is almost unlimited. Health (or illness) can be defined in many ways, i.e., in terms of different categories of mental disorders as classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), as nosological entities, as dimensions of functioning and hindered by complaints, or in terms of positive health, flexibility, or ability to adapt and to self-manage with the challenges of life. Reduction and focus are also needed here. Available literature on the relation between the art product and health mainly focuses on psychopathology in terms of illness as described by the DSM or underlying nosological categories. We call this the nosological tradition. Furthermore, the art therapists in our studies prefer to consider health in terms of “balance” and interpret complaints due to the overuse or blockage of “thought” or “feeling” and lack of “adaptability” given specific challenges. By proposing this approach, they refer to health as clients’ flexibility, openness, self-management, and creativity. We refer to this way of reasoning as the adaptability tradition. The nosological and adaptability traditions are clearly opposed and provide different predictions concerning the relationship between the art product and health.
In Chapter 5, we have opted for a rather pragmatic approach by using available and commonly used questionnaires with good psychometric properties. Some of them stem from the nosological tradition (BSI) while others represent the adaptability tradition (flexibility = AAQ-II; resiliency = RS-nl). The results reveal that the combination of the formal elements ‘dynamic,’ ‘movement’ and ‘contour’ accounts for 19% of variance in RS- nl scores and for 29% in AAQ-II scores. The same combination of formal elements, however, shows only a slight non-significant statistical relation to the BSI; even though ‘dynamic’ and ‘movement’ related significantly to the BSI total score, the overall model that also included ‘contour’ is not significantly related.
Although these results are somewhat unexpected, we assume they are of vital importance. They are unexpected as Haeyen, Van Hooren, Van der Veld & Hutschemaekers (2017) found the same effect sizes for flexibility and mental illness (OQ-45 and SMI maladaptive scales) in their study on
140 | Chapter 6