Manual-based Art Therapy for Adolescents With Depression

Manual-based Art Therapy for Adolescents With Depression: a Pilot Study in Child and Youth Psychiatric Clinic in Sweden

There is a need to evaluate different interventions in order to meet young people's needs of treatment. The study's goal is to find out if manual-based art therapy is a useful method for young people with depression and thus increase the availability of methods of treatment for adolescents with depression in Child and youth psychiatry in Sweden. The aim is to investigate whether manual-based art therapy is useful as treatment for adolescents with depression by examining feasibility, acceptability and compliant to treatment. Secondary, preliminary study of adolescent depressive symptoms, quality of life and functional level is affected by the treatment. Method: Data from youths aged 13-17 years old and their parents will be collected with questionnaires and structured interviews. Measurements are taken before and after treatment. Acceptability and feasibility will be examined by participants' presence, drop out and cancellations and also by checking the art therapists' compliance to the manual and investigate their reasons to diverge from the manual

This is a manual-based treatment and consists of 10 one-hour weekly sessions. The treatment consist of detailed guidelines based on phenomenological art therapy. The sessions follow the same structure: Introduction, short relaxation, art-making, reflections about the image, and conclusions. Examples of comprised art tasks; lifeline, emotional scribbles, and different roles. The art tasks served as a prompt for painting.

the therapists self-rate their compliance to the manual on a 4 point Likert scale. describing reasons to adverting from manual

contains 21 questions, each answer being scored on a scale value of 0 to 3. Higher score indicate more severe depression.

Measure global Health related quality of life. HRQoL score for monitoring and screening uses. the questionnaire consist of 10 questions, each answer being scored on a 5 points Likert scale.

Is a self-reported scale to measure functional impairment attributed to an identified problem. is a five-item self-report scale measuring functional impairment on a nine-point scale. Higher rating indicating more impairment.

47-item questionnaires that measure the reported frequency of various symptoms of anxiety and low mood. They produce a total anxiety and low mood score and separate scores for each of the follow sub-scales: separation anxiety; social phobia; generalized anxiety; panic; obsessive compulsive; total anxiety; and, low mood. Each answer being scored on a 4 points Likert scale.

Inclusion Criteria: Age 13-17 year Depression as main diagnosis Exclusion Criteria: high suicide risk ongoing psychosis eating disorder Untreated PTSD Patients are excluded if there is suspicion of violence, abuse, abuse in the home or other vulnerability which requires other interventions to ensure the safety.