Getting creative is the best medicine

In an exclusive extract from their new book, Creative First Aid, Caitlin Marshall and Lizzie Rose explain how we can use art, music and movement to boost mental wellbeing

Being creative is good for us – it lowers our stress hormones, calms our nervous system and can get us into a flow state. Our innate creativity is part of being human, but it’s easy to forget, especially as many of us have been told we are “no good” at art.

Thankfully, you don’t have to be good at art for art to be good for you.

Creativity as a form of medicine is happening in tiny ways all over the world, gaining momentum in clinic rooms, hospitals and community centres.

In Scotland, some GPS prescribe joining a choir to patients who are isolated and depressed. A public hospital in Taipei in Taiwan has established an art gallery program for dementia patients.

The New York Society for Ethical Culture hosts a virtual, free storytelling circle, which gathers people around the globe to escape into far-off worlds with fairies and monsters – and has been proven to reduce anxiety and isolation for its attendees.

And creativity as medicine is not a recent concept either.

First Nations people in Australia have used dance for more than 60,000 years as a way to share cultural knowledge and promote health and wellbeing.

Shake off shame

Unfortunately, there is no quality that people are generally quicker to announce their apparent failure at than creativity. It’s a curious thing.

Despite this innate quality appearing so early in our infancy, we quickly get the message that unless we show exceedingly unusual promise, the correct behaviour is to declare: “I don’t have a creative bone in my body!”

The traditional forms of “creativity” – painting, writing, making, drawing, acting, storytelling, dancing, playing, singing and so on – can often have some high fences around them in our weird world. Fences designed to exclude.

For many, the memories of dipping their toes into visual arts or music, dance or performance are shrouded in red-hot shame.

Facing criticism in those formative years when our brain and sense of self were still very much a work in progress can be one of the cruellest experiences in life. This shame can hang around for decades, stopping us from getting up at karaoke, or saying yes to that life drawing class, or joining a choir.

It is a story we have heard thousands of times and it means that some people who were told they weren’t good at singing when they were 13 never do it again.

Luckily, being “good” at creativity only matters if it’s how we make our living. But otherwise it’s time to release the grip on the need for it to be good. In fact, why not embrace the opposite: crap craft, bad drawings, terrible songs, awful dancing. Who cares?

And the quality is actually a matter of opinion anyway. If it’s fun and feels good, why deny ourselves this pleasure?

In our new book, Creative First Aid, we take our lead from scientific evidence to offer “creative prescriptions”, some of which take just a couple of minutes, to help with the tough days, amazing days and all the days in between.

Make and mend

At a time when mental health challenges are on the rise and support systems are stretched, it’s about the proven positive effects of making something – a garden, a story, a meal, a drawing – and the powerful interaction this process can have on your mental, emotional and physical state.

It’s about being curious, playful, creative and full of self-compassion – even more so when life gets messy.

Caitlin Marshall and Lizzie Rose are the founders of Makeshift, an award-winning agency providing trauma-informed creativity and mental health programs for communities, workplaces and groups. Creative First Aid: The Science and Joy of Creativity for Mental Health (£20; Murdoch Books) is out now.

‘‘ You need to release the grip on the need for creativity to be good, too