The Healing Power of DBT-Informed Art Therapy: A Creative Approach to Managing Mood Disorders
December 16, 2024
Mood disorders, such as depression or bipolar disorder, often involve intense and persistent emotional highs and lows that can feel impossible to control. DBT-informed art therapy offers a way to channel those intense feelings into something creative and therapeutic.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is a type of cognitive-behavioural therapy designed to help individuals manage intense emotions, build coping skills, and improve relationships. Developed by psychologist Dr. Marsha Linehan, DBT focuses on four key areas:
Mindfulness: Staying present and grounded in the moment.
Emotion Regulation: Understanding and managing intense feelings.
Distress Tolerance: Surviving emotional crises without making things worse.
Interpersonal Effectiveness: Navigating relationships with assertiveness and empathy.
Art therapy is a therapeutic practice that uses the creative process of making art to promote emotional healing, self-expression, and personal growth. It allows individuals to explore thoughts and feelings, externalise and make sense of experiences, and gain insight into their experiences through visual and tactile means.
When combined, these two approaches offer a unique toolkit for managing mood disorders. DBT-informed art therapy builds on DBT’s principles by incorporating creative activities that help you process emotions nonverbally, develop coping strategies, and practise mindfulness in a hands-on way.
A few ways this approach could be used:
Drawing Emotions: Clients might draw how they feel before and after a distressing event, helping them track emotional shifts and identify triggers.
Mood Journals with Art: Combining daily journaling with sketches or colours to represent mood changes over time can offer insight into patterns.
Creating a “Distress Toolbox”: Using art to visually represent calming strategies, such as painting images of soothing places or objects.
Creative expression taps into a universal human drive towards meaning-making, to explore the possibilities of what could be. It can be empowering to turn something intangible, difficult to express or something we feel we need to keep hidden, into something visible, perhaps more manageable and to explore alternate perspectives for ourselves.
One of the best things about DBT-informed art therapy is that you don’t need to be a skilled artist to benefit, this is important as it's often one of the stumbling blocks to people wanting to engage with therapeutic arts processes!
Managing a mood disorder can be difficult, DBT-informed art therapy offers a creative compass. By blending the theory and skills of DBT with the expressive, transformative power of art, it provides a unique and effective way to soothe, calm, connect and find balance.
Some references:
Clark, S. M. (2016). DBT-informed art therapy: Mindfulness, cognitive behavior therapy, and the creative process. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Haeyen, S., van Hooren, S., van der Veld, W., & Hutschemaekers, G. (2018). Measuring the contribution of art therapy in multidisciplinary treatment of personality disorders: The construction of the Self-expression and Emotion Regulation in Art Therapy Scale (SERATS). Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2339. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02339
Khoury, B., Lecomte, T., Fortin, G., et al. (2013). Mindfulness-based therapy: A comprehensive meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 33(6), 763-771. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2013.05.005
Linehan, M. M. (2020). Dialectical behavior therapy in clinical practice: Applications across disorders and settings. Guilford Publications.
Liu, S. I., Chang, C. H., Lin, C. J., Chen, S. C., Huang, H. C., Lin, Y., ... & Wu, S. I. (2024). Modified dialectical behavior therapy–informed transdiagnostic intervention for emotional disorders: protocol for a randomized controlled trial. BMC psychiatry, 24(1), 1-12
Van Lith, T. (2016). Art making as a mental health recovery tool for people with mental illness: A review of the literature. Arts & Health, 8(1), 19-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/17533015.2014.961954
Michelle Saleeba Psychology
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