Page 148 - ART FORM AND MENTAL HEALTH - Ingrid Pénzes

to systematically observe the client’s preferred material interaction style in response to familiar and unfamiliar art materials. It may be assumed this requires therapists’ expertise in art materials’ properties to tailor the art material’s application in art therapy observation. Future research could address the use of different art materials to control for different affective or cognitive experiences between art materials used.
We have found main effects for the formal elements of ‘dynamic’ and ‘movement’ in relation to mental health, specifically experiential acceptance. Above, we have attempted to explain these findings by linking the formal elements ‘dynamic’ and ‘movement’ to material interaction and the concept of “forms of vitality” of Stern (2010, p.3). Future research could investigate this hypothesis by further operationalizing the concept of clients’ material interaction and examining the relation between material interaction and the formal elements of art products.
We have focused on initial art therapy assessment. The main purposes of initial art therapy assessment are to gain a perspective on clients’ mental health to make decisions with regard to the start of the treatment, whether a client may benefit from art therapy, formulating treatment goals, and choosing appropriate art interventions. The focus in our project was the relationship between the observation of the art form and adult mental health. Future research could address the implication of our findings for tracking treatment progress to determine whether it is possible to observe changes in the combination of the formal elements ‘movement,’ ‘dynamic’ and ‘contour’ during the course of treatment.
CONCLUSION
The main purpose of this dissertation was to investigate whether the art form in art therapy was related to adult mental health. Moreover, when empirical evidence indeed showed the existence of this relationship, our main question was how the aspects of mental health were related to the art form: was the art form related to clients’ symptoms or psychopathology, do they concern mainly the way clients cope with them, or are other possibilities more feasible? Next, we elaborated on the question of whether and how to observe the art-making process, the art product, or both.
Our findings can be positioned on the right side of the art therapy triad, which consists of the interaction between the client, therapist and art form
146 | Chapter 6