Talk:Art therapy

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General
This should be an important article. I'm concerned about a number of points. I'm surprised to see reference to 'Malchiodi' appearing so often when there are many important articles and texts that could have been included in addition. The history of the development of Art Therapy is lacking. I was surprised to see hardly any mention of Adrian Hill. The article is American-centric. Other parts of the world also have state (country) registration of Art Therapists. I do not practise Art Therapy but my interest is as a psychologist who edits books on therapeutic approaches and therefore I think entries to Wikipedia need to take a worldview. This article needs to take a broader look at Art Therapy. Stephenpalmer (talk) 10:19, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Agree with this comment. This whole page seems to be controlled by the American Art Therapy Association. However, Malchiodi's work is seminal in the field, so do not throw the baby out with the bath water. The material that has been cited is correctly related to her texts which are the most popular in the field of art therapy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Arttherapyscholar (talk • contribs) 02:05, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Why is the introduction all quotes from AATA or ATCB? Paraphrasing and other references should be included. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ASanders2011 (talk • contribs) 16:37, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

moved this table from main article
-- Mattbrundage 19:33, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

'Assessment' vs. 'diagnosis'
This section was moved here from /Comments subpage by Enviroboy TalkCs 23:37, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

I am new to this, and finding my way, so sorry if I get things wrong. I am a British Art Therapist(and a Council Member, British Association of Art Therapists). The art therapy article as it stands is very US based, and there are significant differences. I propose to start contributing to the page with this in mind. My first proposed addition is this, in the section on assessment tools:

'It is important to note however that attitudes to assessment differ internationally. 'Assessment' is easily confused with 'diagnosis'. Because diagnosis is a medical function rather than a therapeutic one, British art therapists tend to resist the implied medicalisation of what is essentially a non medical approach, which concentrates on 'seeing the person, not the label'. The British Association of Art Therapists statement on diagnosis simply states that ‘Art Therapists do not diagnose…' (http://www.baat.org.uk)'

Any thoughts on this before I go ahead? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Malcolmmax (talk • contribs)

Hi, not addressing your note directly, but think it is indeed a prevalent point of view in Britain and therefore should be represented. Perhaps there should be a subsection for American art therapy and British art therapy. I edited the Diagnostic Drawing Series section to make it more accurate and to improve the references so that they were primary references to the DDS and from diverse sources. Ran into technical difficulties but did my best with goodwill.

Widdershins

The Diagnostic Drawing Series has been around for a long time, yet it has not undergone extensive peer review. No text exists on this subject, and it continues to be largely unpublished except for a few journal articles. Mandala test suffers from the same. It is difficult to say right now if these two tests are actually in widespread use in contrast to others such as the Formal Elements Art Therapy Scale, Silver Drawing Test, or others. Right now, the Wikipedia page makes it look like these are the major or only tests used.

Art based assessment is not really art therapy per se. Perhaps a separate entry on art-based assessments is in order, that would be helpful here. Credentialing should also be a separate page, since what is represented is mainly US. British actually have a much better system and art therapy is included in health care in UK by named title. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cmalch (talk • contribs) 11:49, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

This section makes me laugh out loud. The Road Drawing is drawing game and nothing more. No wonder the field of art therapy is seen as a wacky field. Wikipedia information is helping it achieve wacky status by pseudo-science information. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Arttherapyscholar (talk • contribs) 11:52, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

needs world view warning at top
i don't know how to use the wikipedia tag, but i've seen it before. the intro talks as if california and the united states are the biased center of the planet. i see b-class on this page. perhaps it's the same cause and solution. Nastajus (talk) 16:30, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Agree with this observation totally. Wikipedia entries on professions should be global if the profession is global [art therapy is global]. In fact, someone keeps removing the International art therapy organization links-- my guess would be that is a US art therapist. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.132.240.188 (talk) 13:24, 28 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I have added this banner to the article. I hope I did it properly. The Intro does seem to be focused on the US almost entirely. These references should be cleaned up. I can help clean it up if that is okay. If I was too hasty placing this template just let me know.Riwo (talk) 02:42, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I think the banner should be removed now; the introduction includes a balanced view of from British and American associations. It is still a little long but that's a separate problem. 193.190.253.149 (talk) 08:55, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

I am impressed that you think this is a balanced view of art therapy. It is an advertisement for Lesley University and a very minor college, Mount Mary. You have now entirely missed the major authors of the field of art therapy and whoever wrote this description did so by design and purpose. When this type of thing happens, we who know the field know that politics are at play and personal agenda at the core. Wikipedia, when are you planning to really get serious about providing credible information? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Arttherapyscholar (talk • contribs) 11:49, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

After expressing concern on Talk, I removed material in Assessments to protect the integrity of the assessments (test security). The International Guidelines for Test Use supports restrictions from publishers of assessments and licensing boards to prevent the disclosure of tests and information about the interpretation of the results. Assessments are available only to people who have proved their educational and professional qualifications to the test maker's satisfaction. Those who have been trained in testing are ethically and often legally bound from giving too much information about tests to the public. This is because advance information might influence a subject’s performance on a test, which does not serve the subject well and weakens the validity of the test. Anne9853 (talk) 12:43, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

History
In the fifth paragraph in this section (not counting the block quote), the last sentence of the paragraph suggests a contrast between the type of art therapy that Dr. Naumburg developed and the type that Dr. Kramer developed, separated by "while". However, the comparison is incomplete. The sentence specifies (at the end) out of what Dr. Kramer developed her art therapy but, other than naming it, does not give anything to indicate how Dr. Naumburg's art therapy was different from Dr. Kramer's. It needs a phrase -- a few words -- to indicate this, for example, from what it developed, on what it was based, or on what it focused. It would be nice if someone who knows about Dr. Naumburg's art therapy could add a few words after the name of her therapy.CorinneSD (talk) 23:36, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Art therapy and outsider art
The third, fourth, fifth and sixth sentences of the second paragraph in this section do not make much sense. I don't even know where to begin. Someone who knows about art therapy, or just art, and can write, needs to read these sentences and improve them so that a non-expert can make sense of them.CorinneSD (talk) 23:52, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Defining the Mediums of Art used in Art Therapy
I suggest that digital art should be listed as an art medium used in art therapy within the purpose of the article. With the increased use of technology within art therapy this medium should be addressed. This is a minor edit that opens a whole new chapter into the world of art therapy. Within the Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association is some great information on this topic. Sairalyn Ansano Thong has an article call, "Redefining the Tools of Art Therapy." You can view the article here: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ777017.pdf Adreenah (talk) 20:41, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

Independent Practitioning
I removed this since it was presented as if it were a section of the ATCB Code of Professional Practice, and it no longer is. It is also unnecessarily detailed for an overview article, and is not as global in outlook as the article should be. It is here in its entirety if others would care to revert it in all or part. Anne9853 (talk) 05:35, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Independent practitioners are art therapists who are practicing independently or responsible for the service they are providing to paying clients. This section covers the credentials for independent practitioners.

Independent practitioners must provide a safe and functional environment to conduct art therapy sessions (ATCB 2005). According to ATCB, "this includes but is not limited to: proper ventilation, adequate lighting, access to water supply, knowledge of hazards or toxicity of art materials and the effort need to safeguard the health of clients, storage space for art projects and secured areas for any hazardous materials, monitored use of sharp objects, allowance for privacy and confidentiality, and compliance with any other health and safety requirements according to state and federal agencies which regulate comparable businesses" (2005).

This section also establishes the standards for independent practitioners to follow when dealing with financial arrangements. In summation, it states that the art therapist must provide a straightforward contract to the payer of the therapy sessions. It also states that the art therapist must not deceive the payers or exploit clients financially.

The last topics in this section is the setting of standards for address treatment planning and documentation (ATCB 2005). Art therapists must provide a treatment plan that assists the patients to reach or maintain the highest level of quality of life and functioning. This involves using the clients’ strengths to help them reach their goals and address their needs. Art therapists are also required to record and take notes that reflect the proceedings of the events of therapy sessions. According to ATCB, the following is the minimum of which must be documented: “the current goals of any treatment plan, verbal content of art therapy sessions relevant to client behavior and goals, artistic expression relevant to client behavior and goals, changes (or lack of change) in affect, thought process, and behavior, suicidal or homicidal intent or ideation” (2005) and a summary of the "clients response to treatment and future treatment recommendations" (2005).

Justification of changes and call for more appropriate use of sources
This is a post to explain some changes I've just made and some general ways in which I think this page could be improved and problems avoided in future. My basic point is that a lot of this article made claims without citing a source; made claims citing only somewhat irrelevant, unreliable, or insufficient sources; or was somewhat selective or misleading about what the sources say. Since these claims were essentially about the effectiveness of a health intervention, the standards of evidence should be relatively high here, and Wikipedia should try even harder than normal to avoid being misleading on matters like this. (For further info on that, see WP:MEDRS, which is also linked to at the top of this talk page.)

The first substantial change I made was removing the sentence "The efficiency of treatment interventions for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children have not been researched extensively." The Linda Chapman source cited does indeed say "Although post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children has been extensively studied during the past 15 years, little research exists regarding the efficacy of treatment interventions." However, that's just one source, which is also from an art therapy journal. That doesn't mean it can't be used or that it's inherently biased, but that's a big claim, and a rather vague/subjective a claim as well (what would qualify as “extensive” research?). Thus, any one particular source for such a claim probably shouldn't be parroted by Wikipedia; Wikipedia can report what the source says as something the source says, rather than stating it in Wikipedia's own voice and thereby endorsing it as accurate.

And that probably goes even more so for a source that there's reason to believe might want to emphasise or endorse a certain viewpoint. For example, the American Psychological Association has no particular reason to take a stance that one form of psychotherapy is better than another, but an art therapy association of course does. Again, this isn't a strong claim that this particular source is biased, just that there's some reason to believe it could be; and again, I'm not saying such sources can't be used, just that perhaps they should be used somewhat more cautiously, and not relied on by themselves.

More to the point, I was pretty sure there was in fact a lot of research on the efficacy of PTSD treatments for children, as I've encountered some of it before and as it'd be very odd for such an important topic to be ignored by everyone but art therapists. So I searched "Treatment for PTSD in children" in Google scholar, and got 211,000 results. I expect many of them will not really be research on treatment for PTSD in children but instead will just use those keywords at some point, but skimming through the first pages of results, most looked like they were about that topic. And even if it was a few as 1% that were on that topic, that'd still be over 2,000 studies. So that makes the point that Wikipedia shouldn't just uncritically parrot big and vague claims made by a single source, particularly one we might have reason to believe could have some degree of bias.

Also, as a small point, in this article "efficacy" was swapped for "efficiency", which is not the right term. This is just a minor mistake, but it's one of many, and they add up to make this article somewhat confusing, misleading, and inaccurate. It seems to me there's a need for editors with some background knowledge on the subject to go over this article and fix it up, and keep an eye on it in future. (I know a decent amount about psychology in general, but not about art therapy, and I'm low on time at the moment, so I've only done part of the work.)

The second substantial change I made was deleting the whole paragraph about art therapy for eating disorders. I'm generally very hesitant to just simply delete substantial sections of content from Wikipedia articles, as it was likely have been added in good faith, so I prefer to do everything I can to find some value in it and just cut it down, rephrase it, find sources, etc. However, in this case, I felt it was necessary to delete the paragraph.

The first reason for that was that the two sources cited for that paragraph were both entirely unacceptable. One was a dead link, so I found an archive of the page (https://web.archive.org/web/20141209230602/http://www.mirasol.net:80/integrative-treatment/art-therapy.php), and it turned out it was a page from a residential eating disorder center describing the art therapy service which they provide. This is of course neither a reliable nor a neutral source. This is not a research paper, but rather a business advertising their services. A source like that would be inappropriate anywhere on Wikipedia, but should especially be avoided for articles relating to health, medicine, treatments, etc., like this one.

The second source was just the "About us" page for the American Art Therapy Association. This is clearly inappropriate, firstly because it's not anything approaching a research article, but even more so because it's not about eating disorders at all. In fact, it turned out eating disorders weren't even mentioned on that page, and I searched "eating disorders" in the site's search function and found just one brief mention of the term on a page listing featured members of the association, which says "Elizabeth Hlavek, ATR-BC, LCPA has a private practice in Annapolis, MD and works primarily with individuals struggling with eating disorders and related concerns, such as anxiety and depression." So nowhere on the site is there anything to support the claims that were made in this paragraph, except in the sense of there being tangential evidence (on a different page to the one cited here) that art therapy has been used for eating disorders by at least one person, with no information on how it was used or how effectively.

Furthermore, the claims this paragraph made were quite strong, of the sort that would be justifiable only if (a) there was a wealth of evidence on the effectiveness of art therapy and the mechanisms of its effects, to the point that there was consensus among the experts in the field, and (b) a lot of that research and reviews indicating that consensus were cited here. That is not the case at all. So the very most this paragraph should've been saying is, for example, not "There are a few reasons why this type of treatment is helpful when treating eating disorders" but rather something like "Art therapists have proposed several reasons why this type of treatment may be helpful when treating eating disorders." That is, in the absence of a wealth of research with consistent, positive findings, this Wikipedia article should only report what people have claimed on these matters, with it being made explicit that these are things they've claimed, rather than Wikipedia just accepting the claims. And in this case, one of the sources didn't even make the claims, while the other didn't make most of them either and was entirely inappropriate anyway.

As such, I thought the safest and best thing to do was just to delete the entire paragraph, because it's extremely important for Wikipedia to avoid making claims that are false or unsupported by existing evidence, perhaps especially on health-related topics. If any claims like those that were made in this paragraph are indeed worth making, another editor can add the appropriate versions of those particular claims back in, with appropriate and reliable citations. But I think it was best to first remove these entirely unjustified claims.

The third (and less substantial) substantial change I made was to the paragraph after the eating disorders one. Firstly, I rephrased "Art therapy can be used to help at-risk children, which is stated in Stella A. Stephney's book titled, "Art Therapy With Students At Risk: Fostering Resilience and Growth through Self-Expression"" to "In Stella A. Stephney's book Art Therapy With Students At Risk: Fostering Resilience and Growth through Self-Expression, Stephney states that art therapy can be used to help at-risk children". This was to employ that principle stated above of just reporting on what people claim, rather than Wikipedia itself making those claims, in these sorts of cases where the sources don't support the idea that there is just a general consensus on the matter. A book doesn't generally have to face the same sort of peer-review process as a journal article (most books don't face peer-review at all), and a single journal article would be insufficient to establish consensus on a matter like this anyway (i.e., not just a simple fact like what's the capital of Australia, but an assessment of the efficacy of a medical/psychological treatment).

Secondly, I removed "This is a second edition and it includes information about adolescents and how art therapy can help them work through their issues in a different way than regular therapy." I really see no reason in general to state what edition a book is in, and the rest of that sentence didn't really seem to convey any additional information of value either. It just made this read like it was adapted from an Amazon listing for the book or something like that.

Thirdly, I basically just applied that same principle of reporting on what people claim, rather than Wikipedia itself making those claims, to the following sentences about Riley's article. For example, this Wikipedia article originally stated "The article also discusses how adolescents find it more comfortable to express themselves with pictures or drawings than to talk about their feelings." However, from skimming Riley's article, it appears that (a) that article isn't reporting any research, but mainly just sort-of outlining art therapy, and (b) that Riley cites only one source when making claims about facilitating expression, and that's not specifically for the claim this article repeats, and the source is a 1981 book, so that's not a proper research paper either. So for something like that, it isn't appropriate for Wikipedia to repeat Riley's statements as facts; they're more like Riley's personal assessments on the matter. There's no need to specifically cast doubt on Riley's statements or imply they're false either (unless one is doing so while also citing reliable sources that do the same), but they can just be framed as "Riley states X" rather than as definite facts.

I hope to make some other edits as well soon, such as to the section about cancer, where this article reports on the Wood, Molassiotis, and Payne article like that article makes a series of strong claims about art therapies effectiveness, whereas in reality it reports on some evidence suggesting effectiveness but also says "the methodological shortcomings of the studies, including the modest effect sizes seen in the RCT studies, limit the usefulness of these findings beyond indicating where further research is needed." Unfortunately at the moment I'm quite busy (with a bunch of psychology assignments I should be getting to, actually...), so I don't think I'll be able to get this article properly up to scratch. Hopefully some other people can pick up the task as well. The most important thing is just to make sure that only appropriate sources are being used, and that they're being used appropriately and accurately.

Also, just as a little post-script, I do appreciate all the hard work that must've gone into this article, and it does have a lot of useful information, and I assume everyone who's edited it has done so in good faith. There's just work that needs to be done to develop and refine it further, to make sure everything is accurate and nothing is given undue weight :) BreakfastJr (talk) 07:00, 9 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes better sources are needed. Thanks. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 15:26, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

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