The Arts and Mental Health
How Relevant Are the Arts in Building Student and Staff Wellbeing in K-12 Schools?
Introduction
Perhaps the most iconic painting to show anguish and mental distress is Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting ‘The Scream.’ Even pre-Covid, the image seemed to reflect societal angst, apprehension and uncertainty. It seems even more appropriate in this pandemic era. The line between artistic genius and insanity has often been close and hard to define, with visual artists like Van Gogh’s self-mutilation and Mark Rothko’s suicide reflecting brilliant expression alongside troubled minds.
Many poets have also reflected the fine line between creativity and mental disorders. A 2011 BBC article stated:
Depression, madness and insanity are themes which have run throughout the history of poetry.
The incidence of mood disorders, suicide and institutionalisation, was 20 times higher among major British and Irish poets between 1600 and 1800, according to a study by psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison.
The novel ‘The Bell Jar’ written by Sylvia Plath also reflects and documents issues of depression before her suicide. Some considered Beethoven’s mood shifts to reflect bi-polar disorders. More recently, a 2020 Rolling Stone article stated:
Every generation has its share of musicians — from Charlie Parker and Janis Joplin to Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse — who’ve battled addiction and mental illness. (The two are closely linked; according to national data, about half of people who suffer from mental illness will also experience substance abuse during their lives.)
While these and other creative and artistic people have suffered from mental illness, many applications of the arts have focused on mental health issues while also providing possible ways to address problems like isolation or anxiety in the era of Covid 19. The use of the Arts can allow for individual creative expression and provide a basis for dialogue and connection, where issues can be explored, and where well-being is promoted through a constructive application of the arts in whatever form.
The principal goals of this paper are to consider:
What might we learn from the Arts as we individually and as a society try to maintain or improve our wellbeing?
How might the Arts be used in schools to support students and staff’s well-being in K-12 education systems?
Unsurprisingly, I do not know the answers to these questions, but I think they may be worth greater consideration. Many people will know a great deal more about this than I do. Some will have used Arts-based initiatives and approaches to support wellbeing and mental health. So, how might we learn more from them and disseminate their knowledge more widely? What parameters should laypeople adhere to when exploring the Arts and linking it with mental health? While we may be aware of arts-based therapies, as laypersons, we are not clinicians and should not be utilizing therapeutic approaches for which we are not qualified.
Some years ago, I met with Judy Weiser, a Vancouver-based psychologist, whose book PhotoTherapy Techniques: Exploring the Secrets of Personal Snapshots and Family Albums shared approaches to using personal and family photographs during therapy. During our conversation, she explained how non-therapists might consider images from sources like family albums to encourage individual reflection. However, she warned against venturing into therapeutic techniques impacting others without the pre-requisite training and professional knowledge.
There are some sites close to home in BC where arts-based research has footing and strength. Several UBC Faculty of Education professors specialize in Arts-based research, including t Kit Grauer, George Belliveau, Kedrick James and others. SFU’s arts-based education programs offer Masters and Doctoral graduate programs in arts-based education.
Areas of Reflection to Stimulate Discussion
Here are some initial thoughts to open up the discussion. The first is based on relevant areas of literature. The subsequent three are related to my own and likely idiosyncratic past reading and thinking. Many readers will be able to add to these ideas, thus providing a richer sense of what is possible and what is being practised in schools today – whether it benefits students, staff, or both.
1. A glimpse into the general research about the use of the Arts in schools to promote wellbeing
A (2020) article in the University of Calgary News written by Brittany Harker Martin, from the Werklund School of Education, stated:
For managing well-being
The relationship between the arts and mental health is well established in the field of art therapy, which applies arts-based techniques (like painting, dancing and role play) as evidence-based interventions for mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression. There is also growing evidence that the arts can be used in non-therapy contexts for promoting mental health, such as using performing arts to learn about the core subject areas in schools or doing visual art with adults who are mentally well, and want to sustain that sense of wellness.
In other words, practising the arts can be used to build capacity for managing one’s mental and emotional wellbeing.
She also argues that, despite a significant knowledge base that shows that arts-based learning promotes academic performance, innovative thinking, and mental wellbeing, the Arts are significantly marginalized in many school settings and educational systems. She poses the question:
Could the study of neuroesthetics finally provide the evidence decision-makers require to prioritize the arts in education? If so, we may be on the verge of a renaissance that remembers our human instinct to create.
Choose your own answer to this question. Personally, I do not see many indications of renaissance signs at this time. Whether systemic change is feasible or not, likely there are great teachers and other educators and therapists who are leading the way in using the arts as academic learning and supporting mental wellbeing. But who are they in BC? What might they share, and what could we learn from them? Is it a time for greater exploration in using the arts in schools while we have seen the increased marginalization of music, visual and performing arts in many schools?
Patricia Morgan, from New Zealand, wrote a paper entitled ‘The Potential of Creative Arts as a Medium for Mental Health Promotion in Schools: An Exploration of Meaning-Making, Belonging and Identity Using Creative Processes’ in which she quotes the dramatist Augusto Boal who said:
At its simplest, the idea underlying this is that ‘a picture paints a thousand words’; that images can be closer to our true feelings, even our subconscious feelings.
She makes a strong, research-based case for the greater inclusion of creative arts in K-12 education systems, with a summary that offers the following rationales:
Creative art processes provide the universal language of symbols which all people can speak.
They integrate mind, body, emotion and spirit.
They provide opportunities for an expanded understanding of ‘self’ as they bridge the individual’s inner world with that of outer concrete reality.
They provide opportunities to experience ‘process’ from beginning to end, so expanding participants’ range of literacies.
They merge the learning of process and content, so connecting thinking with doing.
They exercise and develop higher order thinking skills, including analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and ‘problem finding’.
They ground personal insight, for what is created in the art process provides a visual, written, musical or dramatic form, which then reflects that insight. This reflection or ‘space’ is where meaning is made.
2. Using photography to encourage dialogue and reflection, and to promote wellbeing
When teaching in Australia, I spent some time connecting with what was then likely the best Action Research team in the world at that time, based out of Deakin University. One member of that team, Rob Walker, introduced me to work using photographs as data in qualitative research. We used the approach to document recent immigrants’ experiences and reactions to their community college studies and experiences. When completing my Masters at SFU, I worked with a teacher-librarian in Delta School District and photographed a day in her classroom. We used the photographs as data to discuss what she saw happening during her teaching, engaging in discussions about on-and off-task, whether boys’ engagement was different from that of girls, which group composition appeared to work better than others and many other topics.
These experiences gave me some understanding of how well visual images encouraged reflection and dialogue. More recently, they have helped me to think about the use of photographs in supporting wellbeing.
Many sites explore the use of photography in addressing mental health. In one of them, Darshel Diaz shares the story of Bryce Evans:
Growing up, Bryce Evans experienced depression and anxiety — but he didn’t fully understand what he was going through. Bryce turned to photography for unique ways to express his soul, using the creative medium as a therapeutic tool to start conversations around mental health. “Through my photos, I created stories about loneliness,” says Bryce.
Discussions surrounding mental health have always been plagued with stigma and judgement. But Bryce, an artist of catharsis and founder of The One Project, has been teaching, writing and speaking around the world about the healing power of photos for mental health. He emphasizes how all human beings are hardwired for connection and need healthy relationships to thrive. Social connection helps lower anxiety and depression, regulates our emotions, results in higher self-esteem and empathy, and improves our immune system.
Image by Bryce Evans
The evocative photographs explore loneliness. The article shares how Bryce Evans used photography and the ‘digital space’ to support wellness in various projects, including a study of bullying.
Image by Bryce Evans
With digital photography ubiquitous, cheap and extensively used, there are multiple avenues using photography to support wellbeing in schools. The wonderfully-named National Elf Service includes an informative article entitled A picture tells a thousand words, or does it? Photography and youth mental health, posted by Laura Caven and Chris O’Sullivan It describes a project involving a group aged 18-25 which concludes:
The authors concluded that the use of photography had allowed for “a dialogue about their hidden and vulnerable experiences of MH [mental health] using a tool that was familiar, engaging and accessible.” They conclude that stigma, isolation and marginalisation are potential difficulties some young people may face due to their mental health, which can cause further difficulties. Considering different ways of communicating with young people is the key, in order to better understand their challenges and experiences.
You can’t go wrong with a National Elf Service! They must have one in Iceland, where reportedly 40% of the population believe in elves’ existence. On a more serious note, the use of photography to address mental health and wellbeing has been widely used and reported. It likely is being used in BC and elsewhere in Canada. If it is, where is it being used, and what might we learn from others’ work in this area?
3. Charly Cox
Charly Cox is a young British poet whose first book of collected poems, “She Must Be Mad,” catapulted her to fame in the UK. In a poem written when she was 15, entitled ‘doctor, doctor, don’t help me,’ she wrote:
I think I crave rejection
And self-sabotaging days
I like the way they taste
In their smokey beer cross haze
I like to feel this empty
To make some time for pain
Nothing drives me more crazy
Than the breaks of feeling sane.
Cox’s existence is heavily impacted by social media, to the extent that I had to Google half her social media references. This is most likely a sad comment on my social media illiteracy. In other poems, she relates how she has smoked, experienced binge drinking, engaged in casual sex and has concerns about body image. It’s not exactly the kind of poetry to introduce into a classroom without swift repercussions. Yet it’s just the kind of work that many teens might connect with and understand – not because they necessarily share the same lifestyle as Charly Cox but because they may better understand both context and sentiment that she shares than do an older generation. It’s about the awkwardness of life and relationships in an often puzzling world as she seeks her identity and struggles for her survival.
Another poet with a large international following who has touched on mental health is Canadian Rupi Kaur, with over 4 million Instagram followers and 8 million sales of her first two books of poetry. One of her poems is shared below:
i don’t know what living a balanced life feels like
when i am sad
i don’t cry i pour
when i am happy
i don’t smile i glow
when i am angry
i don’t yell i burn
the good thing about feeling in extremes is
when i love i give them wings
but perhaps that isn’t
such a good thing cause
they always tend to leave
and you should see me
when my heart is broken
i don’t grieve
i shatter
Can Charly Cox, Rupi Kaur, or similar work be used at all in school settings? If so, how? If not, why not? Might their extensive use of social media bypass some traditional publishing forms and make both connections and meaning more accessible to an audience less likely to buy books? Are students reading these authors, regardless of whether they are discussed in school?
4. Spoken word poetry
The Next GenMen website features a spoken word poem, ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ that carries a warning of suicide ideation. The video for it incorporates the idiom of spoken word, the rhythm and cadence punching out the message to teen males that, yes, boys can cry without destroying their masculinity. Although it contains minimal swearing, how acceptable is something like this expression to be used in schools? Who decides?
The article also includes the following quote:
“Educators should incorporate literature that disrupts and addresses the limitations imposed by regimes of normalization and enforced gender polarization, while at the same time provides emancipation and transformation to students by offering up versions of human relationships that are egalitarian, equitable and that foster empathy for and understandings of others. Those are the poems boys should know.”
— Christopher Greig & Janette Hughes
So how/might work like this or Shane Koyczan’s work, epitomised in his poem Shut Up and Say Something, be used in schools? Are educators already using this work, and how? What examples are there of students expressing themselves through forms of expression with which they feel empathy?
And why should teachers and other staff be excluded from such expression? Jennifer Smith, in a 1991 article entitled ‘Setting the Cat among the Pigeons: A Not so Sentimental Journey to the Heart of Teaching’ explores her experiences and dilemmas in writing poems about her teaching:
I have known for a while that what I wanted was from the beginning
To write about myself teaching but I felt that was not permissible
I can see that as a thread running through the story.
Peculiar,
Mad,
Different
Hard to say what I really do or think
Afraid now as I write I’ll break the magic
This is mine. I know I take risks.
things go wrong.
Perhaps they can grow worse because I feel I take
More, greater risks
Yet, there are few records I have found of teachers or others employed in education using poetry or other artistic expressions to express their feelings, joy, doubts and uncertainties in their work. Do educators and other staff working in K-12 systems have little time or energy for creative expression linked to their work and profession? Or have they, like Jennifer Smith, felt such explorations were somehow not permissible. Might it indicate doubt, weakness about their own capacity and ability to educate, or their ability to be a part of an education system in a capacity other than teaching? Might teachers and any worker in our K-12 school system be encouraged to share their creative expression related to their wellbeing and mental health in a system with significant levels of mental disorders?
Emerging examples of arts-based approaches in BC schools
The use of the term ‘emerging’ is likely a misnomer. There are probably many examples of schools in BC where significant work has been done to incorporate mental health in expressive work, whether through language, music, visual or performing arts. The problem is, not too many people know about them. This highlights the chronic lack of knowledge dissemination and mobilization in BC’s K-12 education system.
One example is the work of students at Langley Fine Arts School who painted pictures of themselves in their pandemic masks and offered a quote reflecting their thoughts and feelings. Their work is shared in a powerful and expressive 5-minute video. We glimpse the students’ views about the pandemic and how it has impacted their mental health. The video also provides a fascinating way to explore using others’ art for individual reflection and collective dialogue.
Another example is the Social-Emotional Learning and Conflict Resolution toolkit on the Wits in Motion website. It uses dance, film and story to engage youth. (An educator’s facilitation guide is provided).
Mindfulness in May’s The Art of Kindness’ invites submissions in multiple art forms and states:
The exhibition is taking place during BC Youth Week and during National Mental Health Week, so we have chosen “The ART of KINDNESS” as the topic for this year. We encourage students to explore what KINDNESS means to them in their own lives and in their own language. Students will draw inspiration from whatever KINDNESS means to them, and perhaps even what it means to be impacted by KINDNESS. We believe the resulting exhibition will be a great success and create powerful conversations and heart felt art around the subject.
Niki Martin, Program Head of University of Guelph’s Early Childhood Studies Department has produced a report entitled 6 ways to help kids express their feelings about the coronavirus pandemic through art”. She states:
Children express their thoughts and feelings through art and play. They engage in creative outlets to share their experiences, relieve stress and work through what occurs in their lives. Children lack the developmental ability and life experience to understand, verbally express and process difficult, adverse or traumatic experiences.
Art can be a way to promote and support mental health in children. It’s especially important right now to create a nurturing space for children to make art.
Until recently, I was unaware of these excellent BC examples that used arts-based approaches to supporting wellbeing in schools. So my questions are:
Where else is this work happening?
What might we learn from it?
How might it be more widely shared?
How are Art, Social Studies, Language Arts, and other teachers incorporating arts-based expression and learning in ways that directly or indirectly support their students’ mental well-being?
Are there teachers, Administrators, Educational Assistants, bus drivers and any other adult working in a school district who might have used arts-based expression to enable their wellbeing or as tools to counter anxiety or concerns, whether pandemic-related or otherwise?
Conclusion
These reflections are an imperfect response to the question posed in the title. Many educators and academics have practised or researched creative arts and arts-based education, and we can learn from them. This paper’s purpose was to introduce thinking about the arts into wellbeing discussions in schools, whether for students and/or for staff.
An initial draft of this paper was improved by members of the BC School-Based Mental Health Coalition who shared their knowledge of art-based approaches used in BC. Imagine what could be possible if there were effective ways of connecting those well established and competent in doing this work and sharing their efforts so we might learn together. While some networks exist like the BCTF’s Provincial Specialist Associations (PSAs), there is a need to extend and connect more widely.
The following questions are offered to stimulate input and connections and perhaps to suggest that we should widen our thinking about the arts and mental health:
Why should we consider using creative arts to connect with and support student and staff wellbeing in K-12 education systems?
What examples of this work are happening in BC and elsewhere? How can these be shared more widely, and what can we learn from them to improve student and staff wellbeing?
How do teachers introduce materials or concepts that might be sensitive in terms of system or parents while supporting their students’ well-being?
Could the arts be used more widely in addressing staff wellbeing in schools? Have they been used in this way by any practitioners, researchers or others?
How do we better understand the ‘triggers’ that might cause the very things educators are seeking to improve? Might the work on avoiding triggering eating disorders in curriculum development or other sources helps practitioners better understand what triggers are and how to avoid them?
What might we learn from psychologists, therapists and health professionals about arts-based approaches in terms of what educators might use and how to avoid pitfalls like triggering or venturing into therapy areas best left to therapy professionals?
These are just some of the questions that came to my mind, but you may well have others. What are they, and how might you explore them?
Charlie Naylor
February 2021