Demystifying Art Therapy with children and young people in a UK mental health charity: how Art Therapists make the tacit tangible in conceptualising change.

This research was motivated by the need for evidence-based practice for arts psychotherapies in the health and social care sector. An initial scoping literature review identified the need for qualitative research to explore the initial overarching question of how Art Therapy (AT) works. This was adjusted later, during the project, to how Art Therapists conceptualise change when working with Children and Young People (CYP). The chosen methodology was Constructivist Grounded Theory which allowed for collaboration and reflexivity between researcher and participants. The research was conducted in a charity organisation for children and young people in the UK where AT was offered as a funded service that required the outcomes as tangible evidence. Five Art Therapists participated in this research and were interviewed twice, employing the method of intensive interviewing with a semi-structured interview guide. The participants and the researcher created Response Art to visually capture their reflection on the CYP case studies discussed in the interviews. The findings were organised around the Art Therapist’s processes of conceptualising change referring to three key iterative processes: facilitating, witnessing, and reflecting. These processes allowed the artmaking to be seen as a ceremonial, symbolic, developmental, and relational act and the artwork as symbols, expression, and representations of the inner world. In this way, art in the AT sessions has the role of building bridges between the internal and external world of the child on a spiral unfolding journey of change. The overall conclusion of this research was that it remains complex to identify all the AT mechanisms and integrate them into a coherent and cohesive theory of change. A clear recommendation was to use supervision which can include visual ways of reflexivity in similar settings to help with conceptualisation of change in AT with CYP.