‘I don’t know how it helped me, but it did!’: A qualitative study investigating the plausible contribution of art therapy in schools as specialist support for children’s mental health and well-being

The leading participant in this study was a child with ‘complex and additional needs’. Due to his art therapy support, he was not permanently excluded from school. The research created a situation in which the child whom society might reject could speak thoughtfully to a significant person in authority, and that person is shown to engage with and receive the truth he speaks to her. The usual power balance in society is flipped. The thesis brings together a new art therapy research model, art therapy practice in schools and the child’s experience. School art psychotherapy comprises multiple overlaps, including artistic, pedagogical and psychotherapeutic theory and practice. This transdisciplinary research shows how creative processes built trust, leading to a positive multiplier effect that rippled out from the art therapy room into the broader school sphere, interweaving with the school’s flexible approach. A Bergsonian-Foucauldian theoretical framework was constructed to explain what is needed (and why) to build a comfortable enough space for a child to engage, discover more about themselves, and develop in new ways. Henri Bergson’s concept of durée as the subjective experience of time, combined with Foucault’s heterotopic theory, which defines the time-space boundaries of the art therapy room as a counterspace in the school, is central to the thesis. Video microanalysis of verbal, nonverbal, and artistic communication, and of Stern’s ‘present moments’, revealed palimpsestic interactions in this counterspace. Art-based research approaches were used throughout the study and shaped its direction. Art therapy’s interdisciplinary role in enabling this child and their school was revealed; the research shows individual and systemic transformative processes. Links are drawn between Winnicottian potential space and the broader socio-political realities of Hannah Arendt’s ‘space of appearances’. Research limitations are outlined, and the contributions the thesis makes to practitioners, teachers, art therapists, researchers and policymakers are discussed.