Becca Michael, Heavy Burden, 2018, 8"x10", Silver Gelatin Print.
This photograph shows how depression and anxiety makes me feel. I do not feel in control, and I feel heavy, like bricks are piled on top of me. At the lowest point, all I could do was lay down in silence, resisting the urge to pick, pull, and mutilate myself.
When I was 12 I began to show signs of anxiety and depression.
The photograph was created by combining two negatives in the darkroom.
As I am sitting at my desk at work, preparing for my first period class, I receive a text message from my mother saying, “Senior girl from the school down the road committed suicide” (D. Michael, personal communication, March 26, 2018). This is not the first time this year I have received a message about a teen suicide for this school year. What could be causing these young people to take their own lives? Two things come to my mind, anxiety and depression, mood disorders that I struggled with as a teenager, and I continue to struggle with as an adult. Through my experience as an art educator, anxiety and depression has become a frequent diagnosis in Individualized Educational Program (IEP) and 504 meetings. In the United States, depression disorders are the leading cause of disability for people ages 15-44 (“Depression,” n.d.), while anxiety disorders affect 25.1% of children between 13 and 18 years old (Meredith, Stein, Paddock, Jaycox, Quinn, Chandra, & Burnam, 2009). About 15% of individuals with mood disorders will commit suicide; depression is the cause of about 50% of all suicides (Hollon, Thase & Markowitz, 2002).
How can a simple art teacher help the students that suffer from these mood disorders? We can look to the realm of Art Therapy for some answers and strategies to begin to address these serious problems with the students sitting in our classrooms. A simple quote from McNiff (2004) says it all, “Art heals by accepting the pain and doing something with it” (p. v). Spaniol (2012) observes that, “in successful art therapy groups, people with mental illness often develop empathy and compassion for one another, sometimes for the first time in their lives” (p. 289). Art is not just about creating a physical piece, it can be used to create connections with the people around you, and the process itself. Hinz (2009) notes, “art has been demonstrated both to help manage anxiety and to improve mood,” (pp. 101-102). In experimental studies, Tibbetts and Stone (1990) found that through art making, teens showed a significant decline in levels of “depression, rejection and anxiety” (Tibbetts & Stone, 1990, p. 142), demonstrating the positive side effects of art making. They also found that when depression was the main feature of the emotional profile, the art making was even more successful in reducing anxiety, as well as decreased depression, and an increase in attention to a task (Tibbetts et al., 1990).
What We Can Do If art teachers learn and utilize art therapy in their classrooms, they can design lessons that have a more psychological impact, help alleviate stress, and help students cope with anxiety and depression. We can teach art to provide a positive coping skill that might be lacking for the student, instead of going through the motions of another lesson to hang in the hallway when it is complete. “Lack of positive coping skills to deal with stress are related to many chronic health problems and delay recovery from illness” (Hinz, 2009, p. 138). Some physical health problems associated with anxiety and depression are the following: sweating, trembling, shortness of breath, chest pain, nausea, numbness or tingling, palpitations, and accelerated heart rate (“Symptoms,” n.d.).
When someone is idle, they begin to think about their destructive impulses, or they act on them. Edith Kramer (1971) believed that “art was more of a means of controlling, managing, and integrating destructive impulses and conflicting feelings, especially in children” (Cited in Gladding, 2016, p. 94). Hinz (2009) cautions by saying “young people increasingly are capable of delaying impulses long enough to plan a course of action, think it through, and then execute the action” (p. 11). Many people who suffer from anxiety and depression begin to have destructive impulses, like cutting, self harm, or thoughts of suicide. By keeping your mind and body busy, you are less likely to have these thoughts, commit the impulse, and plans of action can be put farther away. The creation of art is a way to do this.
Creating artwork allows students to externalize their emotions and “assist people in picturing themselves or their situations in a concrete manner” (Gladding, 2016, p. 95). Artwork also gives students an increased sense of self-esteem by facilitating self-awareness (Tibbetts & Stone, 1990). McNiff (2004) finds an experiment that was run in a clinical setting, but can easily be translated to a classroom and studio environment. McNiff (2004) states the following: We discovered that empowering the patient artists as decision-makers and creators increased their sense of belonging and responsibility. Jones felt that creative transformation was stimulated by a “social ecology” involving flexible and open interaction, listening, the sharing of decisions, learning from mistakes, trust in people, and a pervasive sense that process was more important than the goal itself. (p. 18) Choices of media in a lesson can be used to target specific psychological needs (Dunn-Snow & D’amelio, 2000). Each material we use elicits a different psychological response, whether it is from the easy use of the medium to the physical properties of the medium. Photography is often used in art therapy because it is less demanding and less risky than other media (Weiser, 2001, p. 13). Gladding (2016) notes how photography can be used to help people increase self-esteem and how it can “give people a sense of achievement” (Stevens & Spears, 2009, p. 11). Almost every student has some device that takes photographs. We can thank the rise in social media for the knowledge that children have with photographs and editing software, making photography a fun and simple task for them. McNiff (2004) notes the following media as examples: Watercolor with its free-flowing nature evokes distinctly different psychic states than thick oil paints. Sculpture made from wood and metal will around=s different feelings than clay constructions do. The material influence us in a way that correspond to their physical qualities. (p. 20) Sometimes the feeling or even watching someone work with a certain medium can be soothing to someone. On social media sites, there are plenty of videos of paint mixing, which is an example on how a specific medium can make someone feel. A child that is finger painting is not concerned with the placement of colors and lines, they are enjoying the feeling of being messy with paint. For others, they might find joy in feeling an oil pastel against a piece of paper, or enjoy the sound of charcoal on newsprint. These are examples of the enjoyment from the process, not just the end product.
Art gives people the opportunity to let go of their mind and to let the body dictate what they make. The work does not have to be complex and groundbreaking to be beneficial. Even something as simple as coloring can help people work through anxious feelings. When working with students who are depressed, we must take in account what the student is most comfortable working with and are the most successful. It would not be beneficial to teach a new medium to start that might fail, causing more depressed moods and feelings of worthlessness. By targeting the interests and preferences of the student, we can build a base to begin challenging the student, push their creativity, and show that we care (Hinz, 2009, p. 251). “Through the principle of isomorphism, the pleasing arrangement of external stimuli can be translated into a satisfying internal state. For instance, the coloring of predrawn mandala pictures has been demonstrated to reduce anxiety” (Hinz, 2009, p. 82). The creator can empty their thoughts and let the media take the control, even for a brief second.
Naumberg believed that art was symbolic of the person behind the work (Rubin, 1980 cited in Gladding, 2016) and that art was a way to view a person’s unconscious (Orton, 1997, cited in Gladding, 2016). “Adolescents...are able to to use symbols to represent feelings, thoughts, and events” (Hinz, 2009, p. 12), so why not use these symbols to find deeper meaning? By getting students to work with the creative process so they can open a “deep personal dialogue with images and feelings that instinctively present the needs” (McNiff, 2004, p. 19) of the creator. Communicating visually is sometimes the only way someone can talk about their problems, especially when the subject is difficult to talk about (Malchiodi, 2012). “The visual arts tap the unconscious and help individuals express their covert conflicts nonverbally initially” (Gladding, 2016, p. 95). The symbols used in art can be used to help people make sense of the “wisdom of their bodies or the wisdom of the world, neither of which speak in words” (Hinz, 2009, p. 12). A lot of artwork focusing on anxiety and depression may use symbols that can be alarming, but “alerting a counselor, teacher, or parent about a student's verbal or graphic expression(s) that is disturbing may be the first step in discovering and potentially helping to solve a problem” (Dunn-Snow et al., p. 52). Ziff, Pierce, Johanson, and King (2012) comment on the benefit of creating artwork by saying, It supports their expressive, cognitive, and affective ways of expression. Art-making in groups builds community and develops social skills...art-making supports creativity and divergent thinking as well as increasing student engagement in school. (p. 102)
Group critiques can also be helpful to foster a sense of belonging and care. As art teachers, we know how to analyze artwork and look for deeper meaning and can prompt responses for students to look deeper in the work to describe their feelings. Discipline-based Art Education uses the following steps in art criticism:description, analysis, interpretation, and judgement. Using this method of analysis, teachers and students create an open dialogue to discuss the work they have produced without imposing our own interpretations (Dunn-Snow et al. 2000). By giving the student the power to explain their work, they know that the teacher is interested in their explanations and care about what the work means to them (Dunn-Snow et al. 2000). The work is praised, as well as the student who created the work. When a student sees their work hanging for others to see, it builds their self-confidence. Students who suffer from anxiety and depression are often silent about their suffering, having a negative affect that no one understands and that no one is there to listen to them. Hinz (2009) states, “according to Johnson (1990), creative experiences can destroy a false self developed in response to shame, and can reinforce an authentic sense of self” (p. 12), which can be paired with critiques to allow students to truly show their peers who they are. Conclusion With our help, we can begin to address issues of depression and anxiety in our art classrooms before there is one less student sitting in front of us. Students can be introduced to the benefits of art therapy and learn which media helps them cope the best. If we can get students to have even one artistic experience, they can have access to the benefits of creative work (Hinz, 2009) even if they do not suffer from these mood disorders. Through the use of art therapy, art teachers can use their art to transform their students (Dunn-Snow, et al., 2000), help “build connections with and between people who have felt entirely alone, to provide hope to those who feel hopeless, and to guide them in using art’s tools and process to develop a sense of meaning and purpose” (Spaniol, 2012, pp. 288-289), and transform lives through the creative process (McNiff, 2004).
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