Art creation has been found to have healing qualities and can be very useful in treating addictions and mental disorders. This is because art creation is a healthy, intrinsic activity for people to engage in. People are intelligent, thoughtful beings that have seemingly been creating art since their beginning. Language is limited in its ability to express the depths of the soul, and creative endeavors such as art and music fill in where language falls short. Art creation is very useful for having personal revelations, being cathartic, reflecting on the self and for expression.
When a person is struggling with addiction or mental illness, one of their biggest challenges is to sort through their behavior cognitively. Being objective about one’s self is very difficult, and understanding one’s own behavior can be very psychologically complex. That is why many people struggling with addiction and mental illness seek the professional help of an addiction counselor, a psychologist or another mental health professional. Coming to understand your own behavior and then correct it is done partly through the advice of a mental health expert and partly through your own self reflection. One of the best ways of freely exploring your own psyche is through art creation as it opens the mind and allows for the free flow of ideas.
Common types of therapeutic art creation include collage, drawing, painting and photography. Collage can be very useful for those who are visually driven. What they cannot express in words, they can express by finding images that other people created and laying them out in a way that makes sense to them and captures their own original idea. Drawing and painting are two very old artistic mediums that people have been utilizing for centuries. Whether someone is replicating something they see in life or creating from their imagination, drawing and painting will prove to be very therapeutic. Photography is a great artistic medium for those who enjoy interacting with the world, be it the natural world or the man-made world.