How Does Art Help People's Well-Being?

 Art Therapy Thursday!

How does art benefit health? Art therapy can be used in many ways in healthcare settings, and the Mayo Clinic explores how art therapy and other creative arts can be helpful to people in a variety of ways for both medical and mental health. See more in this article below:

https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/living-well/the-intersection-of-art-and-health-how-art-can-help-promote-well-being

The intersection of art and health: How art can help promote well-being

Art can be helpful in a healthcare setting, whether it's prescribed therapy, something you participate in for fun or part of the environment around you.

October 16, 2023•

By Mayo Clinic Press Editors

For thousands of years, people have been using arts like singing, painting and dancing for healing purposes. Modern healthcare settings continue to use art to help treat specific conditions, contribute to overall well-being and even help prevent diseases.

You might use art to support your own well-being without even thinking about it. For example, you might doodle when you feel stressed or enjoy playing an instrument at the end of a long day. In fact, artistic expression and appreciation are not only enjoyable but also have the potential to benefit your well-being.

Two approaches commonly used in healthcare settings include:

• Arts in health, which can include artists trained to help patients have positive creative experiences in a healthcare setting. It also can refer to art in the physical spaces where healthcare is delivered — think hospitals, care facilities, etc. This might include art on the wall, musical performances in the lobby and healing gardens.
• Creative arts therapies, which include a licensed professional engaging a patient in arts to address a specific condition or health goal. Therapy can be delivered through visual art, dance, music, poetry or drama and there are corresponding licenses for each type of art specialization.

What are some common creative arts therapy activities?

Music, dance, writing, storytelling, collage-making and painting can all be used in creative arts therapy. Creative arts therapists draw upon their training and the needs and interests of patients to meet clinical goals.

The success of art therapy isn’t measured by the quality of the art produced in a session, but instead by the healing that can happen during the process of making art.

How can creative arts therapy promote healing?

Creative arts therapy is used in treatment for a variety of conditions spanning mental health, cancer, stroke and more. The idea behind creative arts therapy is that artistic expression can help people to feel better and motivated to recover and address clinical needs such as reducing anxiety and blood pressure.

The American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine says making or even just seeing art can impact the brain. Whether it’s part of a creative arts therapy exercise, or something you experience in your everyday life, art can help:

• Increase serotonin levels.
• Increase blood flow to the part of the brain associated with pleasure.
• Foster new ways of thinking.
• Imagine a more hopeful future.

How is creative arts therapy used for mental health?

In the 1940s, healthcare providers noticed that people with mental illness would express themselves through art. This observation inspired the use of creative arts therapy as a healing technique for conditions including anxiety, depression, mood disorders, schizophrenia and dementia.

Creative arts therapy is used to help treat mental health conditions because it can improve focus, assist with processing emotions, improve communication and increase self-esteem.

What are the benefits of creative arts therapy?

As therapy, research shows that art facilitated by a professional creative arts therapist has the potential to positively impact elements of your physical and mental health, including:

• Overall well-being.
• Quality of life.
• Interpersonal relationships.
• Freedom of expression, when talking about thoughts and feelings is difficult.
• Emotional resilience.

What are the benefits of creative arts therapy for children?

Although creative arts therapy is used with people of all ages, it can have some unique benefits for kids. The American Art Therapy Association shares that art therapy can help kids express themselves and share their feelings without using words, which can be especially helpful when working with younger or nonverbal children. Specifically, it can assist with communication in children with autism, soothe kids with cancer and help improve focus in kids with attention-deficit disorders.

Can art help even if it’s not prescribed therapy?

Yes! In addition to creative arts therapy, the arts also can be beneficial to your physical and mental health when you experience them — as an appreciator or creator. For example, creating visual art like drawings or paintings can provide enjoyment and distraction from things like pain and anxiety. Listening to music might help to improve blood pressure and sleep quality, and can help keep you calm and relaxed during a medical procedure.

In addition to having an impact on overall well-being and specific health outcomes, art can support the overall healthcare experience. Through three humanities-focused centers in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota, Mayo Clinic incorporates arts for enjoyment and creative arts therapy in patient care.

In Minnesota, Sarah Mensink is the program director for the Mayo Clinic Dolores Jean Lavins Center for Humanities in Medicine, which manages a variety of arts programs, including:

• Arts at the Bedside, a program where artists visit with and offer people the opportunity to create art during a hospital stay.
• Mayo Humanities TV Channel, which offers recorded concerts, lectures and other art programs on demand in hospital rooms.
• The “Music is Good Medicine Concert Series” and the “Rosemary and Meredith Wilson Harmony for Mayo Concert Series” that offer live music performances in Mayo Clinic facilities.

“Arts at the Bedside is a nice opportunity to enhance the patient experience. You’re treated as a whole person. Healing is more than a cure. It offers a creative outlet and an opportunity for fun,” says Mensink.

Patients aren’t the only people helped by art in a healthcare setting. It can benefit family members and healthcare providers too. Mensink says that when the patient experience is improved with art, the burden of healthcare providers is lessened.

“When patients are happy and occupied with an art project, staff members are glad to see the person doing well,” she says.

Whether it’s the design of a hospital’s physical space, an impromptu concert to enjoy or a dedicated therapy session that uses art to achieve a clinical goal, each has its place in promoting the well-being of individuals and communities. Art has the potential to go beyond treating symptoms and improve your whole self — including physical, mental and emotional elements.

Does the Ketogenic Diet Help Mental Health?

As a part of my PhD program, one of the majors that we can pursue is functional and integrative nutrition. More research has been done to find out how nutrients and food actually improve or worsen our mental health. This article explores whether the keto diet is helpful as a mental health treatment. What experience have you had with nutrition's helping not only your physical health, but also your mental health?

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/108857

Can the Ketogenic Diet Treat Mental Illness?

— Reports are promising, but rigorous trials are needed, experts say

by Jennifer Henderson, Enterprise & Investigative Writer, MedPage Today

February 22, 2024 • 5 min read

The ketogenic diet has long been known for its use in treatment-resistant epilepsy, but attention is now turning to its potential benefits in mental illness as well.

Could something as simple as a diet actually improve notoriously difficult-to-treat conditions including major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia?

The evidence to date has been less rigorous than gold-standard randomized controlled trials. But new studies are underway, and more clinicians are keen to explore reports of patients whose psychiatric conditions improved when they adhered to a ketogenic diet.

Nonetheless, there are challenges inherent to dietary intervention trials that must be mitigated, and broader buy-in from the medical community at large remains to be seen.

"There have to be randomized trials before we can make enthusiastic and evidence-based treatment recommendations," Drew Ramsey, MD, a nutritional psychiatrist and member of the American Psychiatric Association, told MedPage Today. "That said, I'm hopeful and optimistic that patients are going to have more tools to treat their mental health disorders."

What Does the Evidence Say?

Ramsey noted that some randomized controlled trials have shown that dietary interventions -- albeit not specifically the ketogenic diet -- can help improve depression. For instance, the SMILES trial showed better symptomatic improvement and remission rates with a dietary intervention compared with a control social support group, and the AMMEND study showed greater improvements in symptoms and quality of life for young men on the Mediterranean diet compared with controls.

As for the ketogenic diet specifically, Georgia Ede, MD, a nutritional psychiatrist based in Massachusetts, told MedPage Today that the body of research for its use in psychiatric conditions "is really starting to grow."

Ede co-authored a French study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in 2022 entitled, "The Ketogenic Diet for Refractory Mental Illness: A Retrospective Analysis of 31 Inpatients."

Patients with severe and persistent mental illness (major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder), with poorly controlled symptoms were admitted to a psychiatric hospital and placed on a ketogenic diet as an adjunct to conventional care.

Though 3 patients were unable to adhere to the diet for more than 14 days, the researchers concluded that following the ketogenic diet for treatment-refractory mental illness was "feasible, well-tolerated, and associated with significant and substantial improvements in depression and psychosis symptoms and multiple markers of metabolic health."

More than 40% of patients experienced remission from their diagnosis, Ede said, and 64% left the hospital on less psychiatric medication than when they entered.

Among other recent research, a feasability pilot study of the ketogenic diet in bipolar disorder was recently completed in the U.K.

Findings of the study, published in BJPsych Open last October, found that of 27 participants, 20 completed 6 to 8 weeks of the ketogenic diet. A majority of participants reached and maintained ketosis, indicating adherence to the diet, and adverse events were generally mild and modifiable, the researchers found.

What Studies Are Underway?

In an email, a spokesperson for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) pointed MedPage Today to two trials that it is supporting in an investigation of the effects of the ketogenic diet on mental illness -- one led by researchers based in Maryland, and another by a team in California.

Deanna Kelly, PharmD, of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center -- a joint program between the University of Maryland School of Medicine and state Department of Health -- is leading an inpatient randomized controlled trial of a gluten-free diet in a subgroup of people with schizophrenia.

These patients were found to have high levels of IgG anti-gliadin antibodies. The goal of the trial is to determine whether participants benefit from a gluten-free diet, predicted to result in lower levels of schizophrenia symptoms and antibodies to gliadin.

The inpatient setting enables complete control over what the participants eat, she said. Lending another layer of stringency to the trial is that individuals performing the psychiatric ratings are blinded.

Judith Ford, PhD, of the University of California San Francisco, who also received NIMH funding, and her team will look at whether neural network instability in schizophrenia can be improved by a ketogenic diet. Particularly, they are exploring whether deficient glucose metabolism -- at least partially mediated by insulin resistance -- contributes to network instability in the disorder, a mechanism underlying accelerated aging and cognitive impairment in patients.

"So far, it's helping people's overall intellectual function," Ford said.

As for current funding opportunities available through NIMH, the agency told MedPage Today that there are not any that "specifically focus on diet and mental health," but that it would "consider relevant applications submitted under broader funding opportunity announcements."

What Challenges Remain?

A number of researchers pursuing work pertaining to ketogenic diets and mental health have turned to a private organization funding work in this area.

Securing federal funding can be difficult, in part because of the need to show targets of engagement, Kelly said. Even if someone had a cure for depression, she explained, they would have to show, for instance, what links the outcome, improvement in depression, to the brain.

"People have to spend their lives [in order to] understand the target," Kelly said. "Not everybody can afford that. Sometimes, it's not really even that clear."

"That's why we need other funding agencies to step up and take risks," she added.

Other hurdles for researchers include added costs for inpatient stays during clinical trials, and the lack of pharmaceutical funding for dietary interventions, Kelly said.

Mackenzie Cervenka, MD, medical director of the Adult Epilepsy Diet Center at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and a member of the American Epilepsy Society, noted that potential interest in and promise of ketogenic diets for mental health is due in part to a more than 100-year history of the use of such diets for epilepsy patients.

However, Cervenka also noted that "awareness that there can be long-term side effects of the diet is important."

If patients no longer see their doctor for prescription medications, they may not be monitored for potential areas of concern like kidney stones, hyperlipidemia, and bone health, she said.

Cervenka also noted that short-term studies "might not be sufficient to indicate what the benefits could be in real-world applications." For instance, "in our experience about 50% [of individuals] will stop the diet within 6 months, whether they are responders or not," she said.

This can be due to adherence difficulties, she said, or in the case of patients with epilepsy, not achieving sufficient seizure control, for instance, for the purpose of driving.

Ramsey also cautioned that it's important to remember that "not everything works for everybody."

Ultimately, regarding randomized controlled trials, "we need more," Ede said. "Many clinicians will not feel comfortable until we have more."

Jennifer Henderson joined MedPage Today as an enterprise and investigative writer in Jan. 2021. She has covered the healthcare industry in NYC, life sciences and the business of law, among other areas.