You may have heard of art therapy, but have you given it a shot? Even if you don’t consider yourself an artist or struggle to draw stick figures (guilty!), art therapy activities can be helpful for better mental health. That’s why we compiled these 10 expressive art therapy techniques that you can do with a therapist or even on your own.
Before we look at all these great ideas, we’ll provide an overview of art therapy, types of art therapy, and how it works to promote well-being.
What is Art Therapy?
Art therapy is exactly what it sounds like. It uses artistic methods to treat mental health disorders and boost mental health in general. Humans are artistic ( well, some…), and the idea behind art therapy for adults and children is that expressing ourselves creatively can encourage healing and well-being.
For thousands of years, people have been painting, creating, and drawing to relieve anxiety, stress, grief, and other mental health concerns. While artistic expression has been used for healing for much longer, art therapy as a formal pursuit began in the 1940s and continues to grow today.
Types of Art Therapy
While you may think of visual arts like painting, sculpting, and drawing when you first hear the word “art,” any artistic expression can be considered art therapy, but when expanding beyond visual arts, it’s known as expressive art therapy. The types of art therapy techniques are typically divided into a few different categories:
- Art therapy: Includes visual arts to work through difficult emotions, stress, and thoughts often in conjunction with cognitive behavioral therapy
- Dance therapy: Involves physical movement and dance to cope with mental illness and symptoms of poor mental health
- Music therapy: Utilizes music to boost mood and relieve stress and can involve both creating music or listening to it.
- Writing therapy: Encourages the exploration of emotions and thought processes with writing, journaling, poetry, and fiction.
- Expressive art therapy: Uses multiple types of art therapy together for expression in many different forms. For example, may include dancing and music then shift to drawing and sculpting.
How Does Art Therapy Work?
Art therapy works by leveraging creativity for exploration, communication, and insight. It can also be used to develop coping techniques, address past experiences, and more.
Research shows that art therapy activities are highly effective for a wide range of mental health conditions including anxiety, relationship problems, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), stress, substance use disorder, depression, cognitive decline, and more. Some studies even show that art therapy for adults may help improve the quality of life in cancer patients!
10 Expressive Art Therapy Activities and Techniques
Now that you know a little bit about expressive art therapy techniques, let’s look at some of the best art therapy activities for depression, grief, addiction recovery, PTSD, and more.
1. Freehand Stress Painting
If you’re stressed to the limits, then you may try painting or drawing to relieve anxiety. Freehand stress painting requires no parameters…you don’t have to draw anything specific. You can scribble, write, mix colors, or do anything else. If you choose, you can create a stress painting of a landscape, portrait, or scene. Stress painting and drawing work simply by letter you unravel all those stressful, anxious thoughts bottled in your mind using a healthy outlet.
2. Drawing Mental Illness
If you want something with a little more guidance, either from a therapist or on your own, you can try drawing mental illness. For example, a PTSD drawing might portray the colors and emotions you associate with your trauma while a depression drawing may incorporate the loss of hope or isolation you experience. The nature of the drawings may also change as you grow, so it can be helpful to try this art therapy technique regularly to see how it changes.
3. Dance Your Addiction or Mental Health Journey
One of the more common art therapy activities for addiction recovery (it’s also great for overall mental health!) is dance and one of the best ways to dance expressively involves dancing through your journey. You can dance the emotions, thoughts, and feelings of your experience before, during, and after substance abuse and mental illness.
4. Create Masks
We often hide our true selves behind a mask, but creating a mask as an expressive art therapy technique can be a great way to address the way we see ourselves. Try painting the outside of the mask as the way you are seen by the outside world and the inside of the mask as the way you see yourself. Cover it with creative drawings, colors, paint, and anything else.
You can also try creating a separate mask for your healthy self and the self you experience with mental illness.
5. Write Poetry
If you don’t really like visual arts or feel like you don’t have the talent to create even easy mental health drawings, that’s okay! Instead, try writing poetry that expresses the way you feel. In fact, I challenge you to write 1 poem a day for a whole week just to see the wide range of emotions you experience.
You can also combine poetry with anxiety drawings with deep meaning as a form of multi-modal expressive art therapy to tap into different types of art therapy with the same goal in mind. Plus, writing and drawing are great ways to practice mindfulness without deep meditation.
6. Act Out Your Trauma
Trauma-informed art therapy activities, like PTSD drawing or self-care drawing that incorporate aspects of your traumatic experience, can be highly beneficial for addressing, processing, and conquering strong emotions. If you don’t like mental health drawing ideas, try acting out your experience instead.
This can be non-verbal as expressive acting where you display the emotions and thoughts you experience. It can also be verbal acting in the form of a monologue or even a conversation with your therapist.
7. Photographic Art Therapy Activities
Photographs provide an objective, factual glimpse at a single moment. You can use this to gain new perspectives on the world, yourself, your family, and your experiences. Try taking photos of things that make you happy or creating a new narrative with a collection of photos you take over the course of a month.
If you are looking for art therapy activities for grief, then you can even try looking through old photos of a loved one you lost recently. This can help you heal when you lose someone and see their life and the way you carry on their legacy as something to inspire hope.
8. Listen to Emotional Music
Simply listening to music can boost mood, which is why musical art therapy activities for depression are so common. While listening to happy music is a great way to put a smile on your face, you could also try listening to music that mimics the way you feel. This can help you alter your perspective and see that you aren’t alone.
You might even want to try writing a song or playing a tune on a piano, guitar, or other chosen instrument (even your own voice can be your instrument of choice!).
9. Write a Postcard to Your Future Anxiety Attacks
Writing a postcard to yourself for the next time you have a panic or anxiety attack means you get to provide yourself with all the best advice and knowledge. This can be great art therapy for anxiety activity that helps you discover the best ways to calm down and start relaxing sooner. You can even include a social anxiety drawing that can help you reprocess difficult feelings like racing thoughts, restlessness, worry, and more.
10. Create a Collage from Magazine
If you’re not loving the mental health drawing ideas and want something that you feel doesn’t require as much artistic skill, then try cutting out images from a magazine, newspaper, or catalog. Then, use those pictures to create a collage that expresses the way you feel.
You can use the same ideas from the other expressive art therapy for anxiety, depression, grief, and PTSD ideas from this list, except use cut-out images for them. For example, try creating masks, postcards, or stress paintings out of the photos, logos, and images you find.
Conclusion
Expressive art therapy is an effective way to improve mental health and we really hope these mental health drawing ideas, art therapy activities for depression, and other art therapy activities like photography and dance help you! However, if you need a little more help, MindBar offers excellent classes and other resources to help you on your personal journey. Click here to learn more!