Summary: Yes, arts and creativity can help reduce depression in teens. We’ll look at this idea from a new angle: a study that assesses the impact of arts and creativity on depression in a non-therapeutic setting.
Key Insights:
- Expressive therapies are effective – but context makes a difference
- Emphasizing connection between patients and artist instructors improves outcomes
- Focusing on authenticity increases engagement and improves outcomes
- Changes in depressive symptoms and quality of life persisted for at least six months
The Role of Arts in Therapy: Express, Connect, Create
It’s common for mental health providers to use expressive therapies as a complement to standard treatment and harness the power of creativity to help people with depression explore thoughts and feelings from a new perspective.
In our culture, whether we realize it or not, we place high value on art and creativity: we spend significant time watching film and television performances, listening to music, and enjoying art in its various forms, which means we recognize and prioritize spending time consuming art produced by the most creative members of our society, but we may be missing something important – the impact of arts and creativity on depression.
Most people know about approaches to depression treatment for teens like art therapy, drama therapy, and music therapy, often called expressive therapies. Evidence shows those treatment modalities can have a positive impact on a wide range of mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and bipolar disorder. Expressive therapies are effective as adjunct treatments that support first-line approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT).
This article is about something different: the impact of arts and creativity on depression in a non-therapeutic context.
During the summers of 2022 and 2023, a group of mental health researchers conducted an experiment based around a novel concept: an eight-day creativity camp. The idea was to find teens with a diagnosis of depression or teens with depressive symptoms, engage them in an eight-day creativity camp, and assess the impact of the camp on their mental health symptoms.
Creativity Camp and Depression: About the Camp
We’ll discuss the science of the study in a moment. First, we’ll take a moment to explain why the researchers designed the study the way they did and list the fundamental components of the camp at the core of the research.
The basic idea was to take the teens out of a milieu focused on their disorder and reducing the symptoms of the disorder, and instead create an environment focused on creativity and learning. While expressive therapies – in a therapeutic context – are fun and enriching, the context constrains the experience: teen patients are there for treatment, not to learn to create art, and the instructors are there to address mental health issues, rather than teach art/artistic skills for the sake of the art and the artistic skills alone.
Here’s a summary of the differences between expressive therapies and creativity camp. In therapy, the focus is on symptom reduction. In a creativity camp:
- The curriculum prioritizes learning over therapy
- Teens learn from professional working artists, rather than therapists.
- Teens attend for summer fun, first and foremost.
Now let’s look at the key requirements of activities included in the creativity camp curriculum.
Creativity Camp for Depression: Essential Elements
Activities, ideas, and lessons must:
- Feel fresh, new, and exciting to teens.
- Foster self-reflection and self-expression.
- Contain opportunities to learn new ideas while leveraging existing knowledge and skills.
- Invoke curiosity, promote inquiry, and provoke meaningful questions.
- Encourage teens to focus on what feels authentic, and “bypass self-judgment.”
- Encourage teens to have the courage to try exciting new things.
- Inspire teens to explore all their artistic sensibilities.
- Require teens to use their imagination.
- Create situations where teens share their art with others and explain what it means.
- Be fun.
That’s how they designed the camp.
Now let’s look at how they designed the study.
Creativity Camp: Measuring Depression, Anxiety, and Wellbeing Before and After
The research team recruited a total of 69 teenagers with depression or depressive symptoms, divided them into two groups, and administered depression, anxiety, and wellbeing assessments at five time points: two weeks before the camp, right before the two-week camp, right after the two-week camp, and six months the camp.
One group functioned as a control, and researchers analyzed the data collected two weeks before the camp and right before the camp as control group change over time. The second group functioned as the experimental group, and researchers analyzed their data from right before the camp and right after the camp as experimental group change over time. Researchers analyzed data from both groups six months after the camp to determine whether any changes persisted.
The researchers used these standard, evidence-based tools to assess mental health and wellbeing:
- Two self-report questionnaires: the Child CD2 and the Parent CDI2.
- One self-report questionnaire: the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders (SCARE)
- Three self-report questionnaires: The Zest for Life Scale, The Flourishing Scale, and The Satisfaction with Life Scale.
- Social Connectedness. One self-report questionnaire: The Social Connectedness Scale.
Here’s what they found.
Impact of Creativity Camp on Mental Health and Wellbeing
Depression:
Significant reduction in depressive symptoms at:
- End of camp
- Two weeks after camp
- Six months after camp
Anxiety:
No reduction in anxiety symptoms observed at any time point.
Zest for Life (ZfL):
Significant improvement in ZfL scores at:
- End of camp
- Two weeks after camp
- Six months after camp
Flourishing:
Significant improvement in flourishing at:
- End of camp
- Two weeks after camp
- Six months after camp
Satisfaction with Life:
No significant improvements at any time point.
As this information shows, creativity camp had a significant and positive impact on depressive symptoms, no impact at all on anxiety symptoms, and a moderate/mixed impact on quality of life. We’ll elaborate on these results below.
Creativity, Mental Health, and Quality of Life: What the Results Mean
We’ll start with a note on the anxiety outcomes. At the outset of the study, researchers formed the following hypothesis:
Creativity Camp would be associated with (1) a decrease in symptoms of depression, and (2) increases in measures of well-being.
That means the research team designed the camp with the goal of improving depressive symptoms, rather than improving anxiety symptoms. In addition, the criteria for participation included presence of depressive symptoms, and did not require presence of anxiety symptoms. Therefore, the anxiety outcomes elicit neither surprise nor concern. Anxiety was not a focus of the study – and a teen with low-to-no anxiety before the camp would likely report low-to-no anxiety after the camp, which would score as no change/no improvement.
That also means the experimental results confirm both parts of the hypothesis: depressive symptoms and wellbeing showed improvement immediately after and six months after the camp. The improvements in depressive symptoms were comparable to improvements observed with standard treatments such as medication and psychotherapy.
How Does Art and Creativity Improve Mental Health?
The study authors indicate the mechanisms of change related to the impact of creativity camp on depression may follow a framework devised in 2022 by a group of researchers to identify the active ingredients in arts interventions for mental health. That team defined three components that characterize effective arts interventions for mental health: the project, the people, and the place.
Here’s how those three components may have functioned in the context of the creativity camp:
1. The project itself.
The creative component of the camp may promote flexible thinking, which is associated with the ability to manage difficult emotions.
2. The people.
The experience of working directly with professional artists may inspire teens to engage in authentic self-expression, which requires genuine self-reflection, a skill associated with recovery from depression.
3. The setting.
The non-therapeutic context of the creativity camp – and the knowledge among participants that their peers also experienced depressive symptoms – may have had a positive impact on depressive symptoms.
One thing we need to reiterate is that all activities in the camp were required to be fun. We cannot overstate the importance of this. Kids need to be kids and teens need to be teens, regardless of any diagnosis, and this camp capitalized on that fact: they brought the fun, and it may be part of why the camp was effective.
In our work with children, teens, and young adults, we can learn from this research. First, we can remember to harness the power of positive emotion: while treatment does not have to be fun, there’s no doubt that positive emotions like joy and love promote recovery. Next, we take the lesson about professional artists to heart. While trained art, dance, theater, and music therapists play a vital role in mental health treatment, we can also consider the value in enlisting professional artists – under the supervision of our clinicians – to engage with our patients. They may inspire our teens in ways that professional therapists don’t, and ultimately, have a positive impact on health, wellbeing, and long-term recovery.
