What Is Art Therapy?
Art therapy is an integrative mental health and human services profession that enriches the lives of individuals, families, and communities through active art-making, creative process, applied psychological theory and human experience to help therapy patients in their treatment processes.
Art therapy is for people of all ages, including children, adolescents, and adults seeking personal growth or who may be struggling with experiences of self-understanding, identifying confusion, post-traumatic experience, mental illness, and special needs diseases.
How Does Art Therapy Help Autism?
It is believed that art therapy has five functions to help people with autism.
- Social interaction: They can express their experiences by using nonverbal expressions.
- Enhance imagination and abstract thinking: They can vent their negative feelings into art pieces.
- Improve language and communication skills
- Improve cognitive and behavioural performance
- Foster their emotions and sensory regulation in a structured situation
How to Get Started With Art Therapy Activities for Children With Autism?
Drawing and Painting
The main contents of painting and drawing include blind drawing, spiral drawing, drawing moods and self-portraits.
Many studies show that drawing and painting therapy becomes very useful when direct verbal communication is difficult for patients. And these findings suggest that art therapy can help patients with ASD express their experiences or negative emotions and for psychiatrists to obtain complementary information different from conventional history taking and psychiatry assessment. A study in Iran showed that after sessions of painting therapy, children with ASD showed more adaptive behaviours and emotions, and they also showed more active social interaction with others.
Scribbling
The scribble drawing technique can empower the patient to produce spontaneous images from the unconscious and then express their inner world. The early intervention therapist will help a child with autism move from drawing a blank paper to scribbling into the representational drawing.
Art educator Rhoda Kellogg listed some reminders for children with ASD while doing scribbling therapy:
- The environment for therapy should maximise comfort by reducing sensory stimuli such as smell, lights, and sounds. Children with ASD are likely to be more focused on their scribbling when the possibility of sensory overload becomes lower.
- Art educators could provide visual starters, visual models, and visual instructions to help the children to inspire their scribbling.
- Art educators can help name and isolate the children’s scribbling and hence help in their abstract thinking.
Collage
Collage therapy is the therapy that does not require the patient to draw or paint. Collage therapy steps include spontaneously choosing imagery from magazines and then glueing down the pictures without much thought.
Grant Manier, an autistic artist, won art awards for his collages. It is believed that collages could help autistic children improve sensory, social and emotional functioning.
Modelling Clay
Children love to spend hours with their hands immersed in the colourful clay for modelling. They squeeze, roll, and touch the clay and then improve their fine motor skills.
Clay art educators believed that clay therapy could help autistic children with their calmness, focus and attention.
Digital Art
It is relatively new art therapy. It can be defined as “all forms of technology-based media, including digital collage, drawings and video. Therapists can use these digital media to assist the patients comprehensively.
In Canada, Paparella Innovative Arts Center (PIAC) has implemented a group digital art therapy (DAT) program for adults with ASD. This therapy aims to maintain their abstract thinking ability, strengthen and enhance their executive function skills, expand their digital media faculties, and promote their social engagement capabilities.
Textile Art
Patients not only can express themselves with clothing, accessories and toys. They learn to knit, weave or crochet to create their textiles, use sewing machines and needles to put fabric together, and practice embroidery or cross-stitch.
The study hypothesised that multi-sensory textiles provide relief in textures and colour palettes and hence can cope with sensory integration difficulties of patients with ASD.
Photography
Patients can take pictures to describe their inner world, reflecting their perspective of the words and hence they can think more deeply about their environment.
It is believed that photography for autistic students has benefits below:
1. Photography encourages autistic students to learn about social cues and body language.
2. It is a tool to let the autistic student explore their creativity and develop their unique perspective of the world.
Best Practise
Some of the guidelines and practices for delivering art therapy to children who have ASD were found and discussed:
- Set up same routine at the beginning
- Giving instructions in a consistent manner
- Spark curiosity in teaching process
While extensive experience may not be critical, factors that may have adverse effects include:
- Being overly directive
- Having art materials that are overwhelming and overstimulating
- Forcing or being too restrictive with communication styles
In Conclude
Once you’ve located an art therapist, contact them to find out about their experience in the field. As you encourage your child to continue to embark on their art therapy journey, remember, autism is not a disability — it is simply a different ability. Actively approach your child to help them thrive. Art therapy is appropriate for all ages–not just children–and families as a whole can benefit from the experience.
References:
1. Bebchuk MA, Khodyreva LA, Basova AY, Dovbysh DV, Dzhavadova EI, Konshina EE. [Art therapy in treatment, rehabilitation, micro-and macrosocial adaptation of children with autism spectrum disorders using a special rehabilitation and adaptation program “Art therapy (drama therapy): ‘Because You are Needed…’ for children with general disorders of psychological development and other mental disorders”]. Probl Sotsialnoi Gig Zdravookhranenniiai Istor Med. 2019 Aug;27(Special Issue):536-542. Russian. doi: 10.32687/0869-866X-2019-27-si1-536-542. PMID: 31747144.
2. https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/art-therapy
3. Hu J, Zhang J, Hu L, Yu H, Xu J. Art Therapy: A Complementary Treatment for Mental Disorders. Front Psychol. 2021 Aug 12;12:686005. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.686005. PMID: 34456801; PMCID: PMC8397377.
4. Jalambadani Z. Art therapy based on painting therapy on the improvement of autistic children’s social interactions in Iran. Indian J Psychiatry. 2020;62(2):218-219. doi:10.4103/psychiatry.IndianJPsychiatry_215_18
5.https://the-art-of-autism.com/the-value-of-art-therapy-for-those-on-the-autism-spectrum/
6.http://www.monkeydoit.com/clay-modeling-child.php
7.Darewych, Olena. (2021). The Future Is Now: Group Digital Art Therapy for Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorder (L’avenir dès maintenant : groupe d’art-thérapie numérique pour adultes ayant un trouble du spectre de l’autisme). Canadian Journal of Art Therapy. 34. 1-7. 10.1080/26907240.2021.1907940.
8.Seyedi, Farrah. (2019). Due to the enhancement of textiles, how can we cater to sensory textiles for autistic audiences in a secondary education setting?. 10.13140/RG.2.2.23042.32965.
9.https://www.edutopia.org/article/4-benefits-photography-autistic-students