Expressive Art Therapy: A Case Study

Introduction
This paper discusses how Expressive Art therapy can make up the deficiencies of traditional/ current mental health services, in terms of the inability to remove clients’ self-stigmatization, fulfilling clients’ spiritual need, creating hope during recovery and allowing clients to communicate non-verbally, for psychiatric clients during recovery. In the first section, definition of expressive art therapy is discussed. The second section strengthens the position of this paper, and the third section provided evidences and rationale to show how art therapy could benefit clients differently. In the last section, how art therapy can be further discussed is proposed.
Content
What is Expressive Art therapy? There are many different kind of expressive art therapy applied in mental health setting. According to Malchiodi (2005), expressive art therapy includes the use of “art/ music, dance/movement, drama, poetry/creative writing, play, and sand-tray within the context of psychotherapy, counselling, rehabilitation, or health care” (p. 2). Art therapists support clients through using different media or materials to express and reflect on their different intrinsic dynamic (Knill, Barba, & Fuchs, 1995) that could not be easily articulated by words.

Stigmatization is one of the barriers that trigger other psychological issue that obstruct clients from recovery, and therefore treatments that could untangle/ remove the internal traumatic and discriminative effect causes by social and biomedical labeling (Murphy, 2007, Estroff, 1989) is recommended. Removing internal stigma and discrimination is also a matter of “human right” that protect the client’s accessing equal rights on career, education and social services etc. (Jacabson & Greenley, 2001). In long term, celebrating the human right can “advocate for the reduction and ultimately the elimination of involuntary commitment and other forced treatment” (Jacabson & Greenley, 2001, p.