Abstract
Participation in creative activities has been linked with positive outcomes for people with mental illness. This longitudinal qualitative study is a one-year follow-up of eight mental health consumers who participated in a series of creative workshops in Brisbane, Australia that aimed to increase participants’ capacity and skills in sharing their stories of recovery with others. It also sought to understand successful factors of the creative workshops to inform future workshops. Semi-structured interviews gathered information regarding participants’ memories of the workshops and how they had shared their stories with others over the preceding 12 months. Interpretative phenomenological analysis identified that participants’ enjoyed being engaged in a range of creative mediums in a group setting; that peer mentor support was highly valued; and that participants’ recovery stories had become more positive and were shared more often and openly with others. Overall, participation in the creative workshops had long-lasting benefits for participants with respect to improved confidence and understanding about their illness. Future creative workshops should consider the inclusion of peer mentors with lived experience as a support for participants to reauthor their recovery story.
Highlights
There is an increasing emphasis in mental health services on how non-traditional interventions, including art, can support service users [1, 2]
While historically art has been used in mental health assessments as a diagnostic or projective tool [3], more recently a wide range of artistic mediums have been used in a creative workshop format to promote recovery for people experiencing mental health issues [2, 4,5,6]
This paper reports a one-year follow-up of eight participants who took part in a series of creative workshops, (Your Story Matters), in Brisbane, Australia in 2015
Summary
There is an increasing emphasis in mental health services on how non-traditional interventions, including art, can support service users [1, 2]. While historically art has been used in mental health assessments as a diagnostic or projective tool [3], more recently a wide range of artistic mediums (dance, music, poetry, painting, photography, and digital media) have been used in a creative workshop format to promote recovery for people experiencing mental health issues [2, 4,5,6]. Providing people with an opportunity to “re-author” their story through the use of creative processes and move from a primary focus on their illness to positive aspirations for their future can be an important step in the recovery process [6]. Sharing stories of recovery in creative workshops
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