Treatment of mood disorder in an at-risk sample of high school adolescents: a randomized trial of art therapy intervention

• Main Author: Hucul, D. Michele
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/8939

Although a vast scope of literature has investigated the efficacy of other treatments of depression there remains a gap in the research of creative arts modalities as treatment for depression. The following research study will address this oversight providing new information on the efficacy of short-term art therapy as treatment for depression in the adolescent population. In the following study high school counselors and other helping professionals identified high school adolescents at risk for future depressive disorder by virtue of having elevated depressive symptomology. The study then compared two randomly assigned individual or group art therapy treatment groups to a wait-list control group. The Children's Depression Inventory, Stony Brook Child Psychiatric Checklist, and the Children's Behavior Inventory assessments were administered pre- and post-treatment for all three groups. Quantitative statistical analysis was used to determine the effectiveness of individual or group art therapy intervention vs. the non-intervention control group. Results seem to show that the individual art therapy treatment group when compared to themselves after treatment displayed a significant decrease in depressive symptoms according to the Children's Depression Inventory [t(df=3)=2.87, p=0.03] and the Child Behavior Checklist [t(df=3)=3.33, p =0.02]. Those receiving group art therapy treatment seemed to show significant improvement according to the Children's Depression Inventory [t(df=4)=2.39, p=0.04] when compared to themselves after treatment. The Control Group results indicate there was no significant difference in the scores on any of the three psychological measures. Between group analysis indicates the individual treatment group showed a decrease in psychiatric symptoms (p=.04) compared to the control group. In light of the many between group differences it is the researcher contention that a larger sample size may result in stronger effects. The post-treatment comparison of the combined treatment groups to the control group indicates significantly fewer parent-reported behavior problems and social incompetencies (p=.01) as well as psychiatric symptoms (p=.02). Based on these results it is concluded that individual and group art therapy are effective in relieving symptoms of depression in youth compared to no treatment, with individual art therapy appearing to be more effective than group art therapy.