Art Isn’T Just Self-Expression: Art Can Be Good For Mental Health

Here’s an obvious observation.

Doing art whether music, painting, writing, dance, whatever can contribute immeasurably to psychological wellbeing.

Why am I so screwed up? It was a decent retort and I said so. Undoubtedly it’s a tremendous source of happiness for a great many people, art ain’t the source of the greatest happiness in everyone’s life. Eventually, look, there’re two dimensions to this.

Whenever living well involves feeling good about life, having something to do that you care a lot about that you immerse yourself in it, becoming good enough at something to take some pride in it, having people in your lifetime whom you care about and who care about you, and feeling connected with something that takes you beyond yourself like your family, your community, your work, and so forth, in simple terms. Now let me tell you something. In his recent book, Flourish, Martin Seligman often regarded as the father of positive psychology maintains that mostly there’re five critical elements of psychological wellbeing, positive emotion, engagement, accomplishment, positive relationships, and meaning. A well-known fact that is. Much of the time spent working at art is practice rather than creative discovery, and practice, certainly, is essential for building skill, that is itself a source of great satisfaction.

Doing art also connects the person doing it with other artists and with audiences.

It is clear, I believe, that art can provide any of these elements of well being.

It is, or at least can be, a source of important friendships. While doing art also connects the artist with a field of art, with a history and a language that goes far beyond what any individual artist does. With all that said… Usually, most obviously. Not always maybe. Therefore, time seems to disappear, to be suspended. While spending hours at a time playing, writing, painting, dancing, and so forth, they also immerse themselves in it. Now please pay attention. Art can therefore inarticulate. We are looking at experiences that elevate a person beyond the brutish and humdrum qualities of much of human life. Have you heard about something like this before? Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis, refers to this as divinity or sacredness, terms I find a bit one but a very important one.

By this he means that art somehow becomes imbued with meanings that go well beyond the surface of the artistic product.

His example is Warhol’s Brillo Box or Campbell soup cans, that somehow convey a significance way beyond their visual surface.

Arthur Danto a philosopher and art critic refers to the transcendent capacity of art as the transfiguration of the commonplace. While shaping of self, connections with people and a culture, and the potential for transcendent experience apply both to people without mental disorders and those with mental disorders, the contributions that art can make to psychological well being via enjoyment, immersion, development of skill, revelation and expression of emotion. Notice that which also addresses the human potential to live well, all of this has vast implications for how we can build satisfying lives for ourselves and our children as well as suggests that there ought to be a public mental health agenda that isn’t limited to the treatment of mental illnesses.