The “State of The Art” of Art Therapy in Psychiatry: Reflections on International Evidences and Italian Experiences

Abstract

The complex and reciprocal dialectic between art and psychiatry has represented the object of investigation of many researchers for many years in last century, although a specific role of art therapy in psychiatric. The art-therapies are currently conceptualized as forms of psychotherapy employing artistic media (painting, dance, theatre, music etc.) as an expressive and receptive communication modalities. In Italy, along the XX century there has been a growing diffusion of art-therapies as rehabilitation techniques in several settings. The currently available empirical evidence suggests a relevant role for art-therapies in psychiatry, especially for psychotic’s patients with negative symptoms and depression. This brief summary has not set as its objective a critical reevaluation of all the studies present in the literature on Art Therapy, a task left to the experts of the meta analyses and reviews but wants to be a reflection on some limits of the current studies. Final point is on the Italian reality: despite the evidence and the ten-year tradition on Art Therapies in Italy, they have a fairly wide spread in the rehabilitation services of the Mental Health Departments and Art Therapy is still confused as “socialization” or as techniques of which little is known about the effect. This confusion refers to the need for training on the subject to be constant for psychiatric service operators and for scientific researchers to produce evidence that can be used to finalize its use in a personalized way with a view to an increasingly modern precision medicine.