About

Arts-based mental health research, using creative practices like music, theatre, dance, drawing, poetry is enjoyed by many young people and can bring new insights and understanding about adolescent mental health in ways that traditional, often adult-led, research methods cannot. There is untapped potential to improve understanding of mental health if we could bring arts-approaches together with science and youth perspectives. However, this potential is held back by many research barriers. Scientists can find it hard to understand the processes and outcomes of arts-based research, meaning art-science collaborations face challenges. Youth, scientists and artists also have different vocabularies and research values. We are also without a shared view, across youth, scientists and artists, on how to interpret the meaning of the art produced by young people about their mental health. An understanding of exactly how and why arts-based approaches can be helpful to youth mental health is also lacking. Finally, arts researchers and youth can find the use of standardized measures of mental health, which are popular in science, difficult. Project CREATE will address each barrier by bringing youth, scientists and arts researchers together. We first conduct reviews of the main barriers and potential solutions and take these ideas into Living Labs. These bring youth lived experience into exploration around methods and interpretation with researchers.

We focus our methods development in relation to adolescent loneliness as stimulus. Our ambition is to create a large resource hub, for anyone working at the intersection of arts, science and youth voice, presenting teaching tools, frameworks, glossaries, analysis methods and good practice guides to improve and optimise the learning we can glean from youth-informed, science friendly, arts based research.