Creativity for Mental Health: Seeking New Answers to an Old Question

Abstract

Mental health is one of the potential outcomes of creative behavior deserving of further research, as much of previous anecdotal and scientific evidence has offered conflicting findings on this topic. Integrating the expertise and methods used by scholars in different disciplines (e.g., art therapy, clinical psychology, cognitive psychology, personality psychology) may help clarify the conditions under which creative behavior is or is not helpful for specific aspects of mental health, and generate new insights into the mechanisms that might explain such benefits.