How art therapy research is changing the world (part 2)

As a practising visual artist, do you find your work influences your research?

My art-making is definitely a wellness and processing practice for me. It helps me work through emotions and serves to problem-solve. It also feeds my teaching and research – with the feedback I get continuing to inspire me. A lot of my hypotheses and inspirations for our studies come from my own arts practice. For example, our research on doodling comes from my experiences of doodling or seeing others doodle and noticing how it helps focus attention while also enjoying the benefits of making something.

I also try to do something called a ‘Saturday open studio’, where Saturday is my creative day. I put my laptop and phone away and try to step away from work emails. This becomes my day to have fun and explore. I invariably find that when I am distressed or upset and able to channel or express it, I feel better. I remember feeling really angry with someone, and I just started working with oil pastels. After I finished that piece, I actually felt compassion for that person, not anger.

I’m really passionate about this idea of externalising. For me, getting feelings out of our bodies and heads and into an external object somehow takes away their emotional charge and they seem to lose their negative associations. Once those feelings exist outside of me, they seem to lose their negative intensity. For me, that’s the first step in processing and moving through difficult experiences.

This concept of sublimation – externalising emotions in constructive ways to gain perspective – aligns with the idea of maintaining everyday wellness practices. For instance, when I’m working at my art table, I often find myself engaging with this process as part of my self-reflection and healing. Sometimes my kids might need something, and I’ll say, ‘Okay, wait, I’m just finishing something’, and they’ll say, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s okay, Mommy, we like it when you are working on your art, because then you’re yelling at everybody a lot less.’ So, they see it too, that I am a different person when I have this expressive time. Just imagine if everyone had this time to really invest in themselves: how much more peaceful and healthy a world we could be?

By engaging in our own art-making practice, we continually refuel ourselves, reinforcing just how impactful and beneficial this work is. We become living examples of its value. It’s like exercising a muscle. It nurtures the part of ourselves that makes us unique, reminding us, ‘This is who I am, and these are the things that keep me going.’ It’s the oil that helps us squeak a little less. And, well, I’ve definitely reached the age where I notice the squeaking!

The term ‘art therapy’ often implies a focus on clinical populations. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on conducting therapeutic research with non-clinical populations.

This is tricky, because sometimes people think art therapy is just for kids, right? They assume this is something children do. Other times, people are intimidated by the word ‘art ‘or by the word ‘therapy’. In order to make sure that we are not limiting folks in any way based on their perceptions, I have occasionally recruited for studies by calling it ‘visual self-expression’.

My general approach for research or an intervention is to try it out with healthy populations, and then I bring it to a clinical population. If we’re exploring a previously established art therapy practice in the clinical setting, then you can dive right in, but if it’s a relatively new approach, I have tended to work with relatively healthy populations. That said, what is relatively healthy? ? A recent Lancet article concluded that as we age, one in two people in the world have a risk of have a mental health disorder (McGrath et al., 2023). None of us are immune to the challenges of emotional distress and struggling to cope with it. So, I think of the intersection of arts and health as being on a continuum.

Even in our studies, which focus on relatively healthy populations, it’s not uncommon for someone who identifies as healthy to have deeper challenges come to the surface during the art-making process. Our research teams are mindful of this and stay alert to the additional needs that even so-called ‘healthy individuals’ may experience. When that happens, either myself or my doctoral students – who are all trained creative therapists – shift into therapist mode to help them navigate these emotions or make referrals for additional support if needed.

In our latest book called Arts Based Approaches to Support Mental Health and Well-being, we’ve expanded on this perspective (Hommel & Kaimal, 2025). In any arts-based psychosocial support programme that takes a public health approach, we’re guided by a foundational understanding of what the arts mean to people: they evoke emotions and can bring up things we may or may not be consciously aware of. We emphasise that arts-based psychosocial support is not the same as art therapy. Teachers and facilitators may use arts activities to create pathways for healing and learning, but if they notice a participant has additional clinical needs, they need to refer them to a professional therapist for more specialised support.

I think art therapists often grapple with how much they can responsibly let go of to arts-in-health professionals. I wonder if the art therapy profession might be more cautious about this than arts-in-health professionals, who may feel less constrained when it comes to the expressive side of things. It’s not an easy issue. We’ve worked so hard to become art therapists, so the idea that someone else could do something similar with far less training can be difficult to navigate.

However, I believe this is something we need to embrace to expand the therapeutic aspects of the arts into the public health domain. In some ways, arts-in-health feels more accessible and palatable to people. When you combine the words ‘art’ and ‘therapy,’ people sometimes get apprehensive, but arts-in-health can act as a gateway – opening the door to deeper therapeutic work with a trained art therapist when it’s needed.

The Healing and Education through the Arts (HEART) programme is a great example of the benefits which collaborating with arts-in-health can have. The programme works with children and families around the idea that the arts can help us manage ourselves, understand our emotions, self-regulate, while also bringing joy and fun into spaces usually focused on more formal approaches to education or child development. The programme has existed for almost 14 years and goes to areas where there is a need – natural disasters, violence or social and economic disadvantages, or war zones. Using a train-the-trainer model, HEART enables local teachers, facilitators and childcare workers to learn how to use the arts to help children manage their emotions and process stress. They have expanded their programming to families as well as humanitarian workers, because all of us need tools and strategies to cope with stress.

The book we produced in collaboration with Save the Children comes from this work and shares some of the research around arts and human development, as well as the interventions and outcomes they’ve seen in reaching over a million children around the world. I’m excited for this to come out because it’s a collaboration between practitioners and academics. My doctoral students, my research team and I all worked with Sara Hommel, the Director of HEART, and her colleagues and practitioners around the world. As each chapter is co-written by practitioners and researchers, we’ve tried to bring together both the academic aspect and other, equally important, elements of learning in the field.

What are some of the other changes or advances you’ve witnessed during your time in the art therapy profession?

I think there’s an increased investment in and recognition of research. There is more funding and a greater recognition of art therapy’s value, because people have seen that it helps. I recently saw some feedback from a Veterans Administration proposal where the reviewers responded, ‘Why do you want to do research? We know it works.’. That was nice to hear but in reality this is rare and we do need systematic research to better understand why, how or when art therapy works.

It is still a struggle though on many levels. Starting salaries are relatively low for human services professions, college costs keep going up, and students rack up loans in the United States. Are art therapists getting jobs commensurate with the costs? I know our students get jobs, but there are also programmes closing because universities are not able to stay solvent.

Beyond the US, however, there is also an increasing global interest in art therapy. We’ve recently started a programme – the first master’s level art therapy programme in India. These are the big changes, with people seeing the value of a master’s level art therapy credential, but I don’t think the struggles have gone away. I think we continue to have to explain ourselves and to be taken seriously. That is, I think, a forever issue. As long as the arts are seen primarily as leisure or fun, that’s going to always be an issue.

I was wondering if your attention to arts and leadership has been another attempt to expand the visibility and potential of art therapy?

Yeah, I’m trying to. I think a big part of leadership is keeping your eyes on the prize, communicating your vision, and staying steady through storms and difficult times. Being active in art making has certainly helped me in my leadership practice – to process difficult experiences, gain clarity, and stay rooted. I think there’s a particular role for the arts in helping to process and navigate leadership.

Finally, what advice do you have for emerging researchers in the field of art therapy?

I’ve always tried to balance my inherent idealism with pragmatism in order to see the ideal come to some fruition. So, my suggestion is to invite readers to figure out what that balance is for you. You do have to make a living. Do not go into unmanageable debt, but don’t be afraid to follow what excites you, because the things that excite you will become the road map for someone else.

I had a student who was very interested in hoarding disorder and through her research she has contributed to the world by bringing this topic to awareness. Similarly, I have another recent graduate who was very interested in art therapy and burns. She has gone on to publish extensively and is now the pre-eminent expert on burns and art therapy. So, I would say to use the things that excite you as fuel. Use that as the ‘seed’. When you really invest in an idea and you’re committed to it, sometimes the world sends you the resources to build it further.

Read part 1 of this interview

You can read the first part of this interview with Dr Kaimal’s work in the previous issue of InSight.

Read part 1

References

• McGrath, John J., et al. (2023) ‘Age of onset and cumulative risk of mental disorders: a cross-national analysis of population surveys from 29 countries’, The Lancet Psychiatry.
• Hommel, S., and Kaimal, G. (2025) Arts-Based Approaches to Promote Mental Health and Well-Being.