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Routledge Handbook of Arts and Health
This comprehensive Handbook defines, surveys, and critiques the burgeoning discipline of arts and health. It brings together the growing evidence base and discusses policy and practice from around the world. Divided into five sections, the Handbook introduces the discipline of the arts and health, explains its importance, and critically examines historical developments, current practice, research, theory, and policy.
Introduction
These Handbook has five sections, in order to provide an understanding of:
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1) Context: an historical and contemporary perspective on the arts and health, defining the field and critically considering the current evidence base;
2) Domains of art: providing examples of how the visual arts, creative writing, music, dance, and drama are used in practice to improve health and wellbeing;
3) Populations: how the arts can be used across the lifespan to help with specific health needs, working with specific groups, from perinatal care to palliative care;
4) Settings: how the arts are applied in allied professions, e.g., public health, psychiatry and occupational therapy, and settings, e.g., hospitals, museums and educational and forensic settings;
5) Theoretical perspectives: which considers different approaches to understanding the health benefits of the arts, including systems theory, sociological, biological, epidemiological and psychological lenses, as well as discussing ethical and epistemological issues essential to practice and knowledge acquisition.
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History of the arts and health
Professor Susan Hogan begins by tracing the history of the arts for health, from its potential use in palaeolithic healing rituals to the development of specific regulated professions (such as art psychotherapies). She highlights how ingrained the arts are as a communicative tool within societies, enabling shared symbolic meaning, posing art making as integral to what it means to be human. From this overview we can see the arts for health as an ancient practice, and how, historically, the arts have been used for a range of wellbeing functions (e.g., distraction, expression, community building), acknowledging that practices seen currently as ‘new’, such as ‘art on prescription’ are based on historical precedents.