What Is Art Therapy? A Beginner's Guide to Healing Through Creative Expression

Art therapy is often reduced to a coloring book or a quiet afternoon with watercolors. The reality is a bit more precise, and more consequential. Art therapy is a distinct mental health profession, grounded in psychological theory and practiced by clinicians with graduate level training. At drawchange, it is the discipline that shapes every program we run and every child we serve.

A drawchange participant heals through an art therapy collaging exercise.

The AATA Definition of Art Therapy

The American Art Therapy Association (AATA) defines art therapy as a mental health profession that enriches the lives of individuals, families, and communities through active art making, the creative process, applied psychological theory, and human experience within a psychotherapeutic relationship (American Art Therapy Association, 2024).

Put simply, art therapy uses drawing, painting, sculpting, and related creative processes as a structured pathway to emotional insight. It's directed by a credentialed art therapist, a clinician holding a master's degree or higher with training in both studio art and psychological theory (American Art Therapy Association, 2024). The art itself is not the endpoint. It is the medium through which a therapist and client access thoughts and feelings that are difficult to reach through conversation alone.

This distinction is worth sitting with, because it separates art therapy from two things it is often mistaken for: recreational art making and general arts education. Both have real value. Neither is art therapy. What defines the profession is the clinical relationship and the intention behind every material, prompt, and session.

How Art Therapy Works

A session of art therapy is deliberate from start to finish. The therapist chooses materials, themes, and prompts based on what a particular child needs in that moment, whether the goal is processing grief, building self esteem, or working through a memory that has been difficult to name.

A drawchange participant focuses on expressing their emotions via painting.

This matters most for children, who often have not yet developed the vocabulary to describe complex emotional experiences. A color choice, a brushstroke, or shaping of a piece of clay can communicate what language cannot yet reach. Through this process, children gain a tangible sense of authorship over their own experience, often for the first time.

Who Benefits from Art Therapy?

Art therapy supports people across the lifespan, but its effects are especially well documented among children who have experienced Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs. ACEs include exposure to abuse, neglect, violence, or household instability, and they leave many children with the kind of invisible wounds that surface as difficulty concentrating, emotional withdrawal, or disrupted sleep.

A growing body of research supports the role of creative arts based interventions in both preventing and supporting recovery from the mental health consequences of ACEs, offering children a nonverbal outlet at a stage when conventional talk therapy may not yet be accessible to them (Bhui et al., 2022).

This is the population at the center of drawchange's mission. Every child who enters one of our art therapy-based programs is offered a structured, judgment free space in which to create and eventually, heal.

Art Therapy at drawchange

Our curriculum is developed and regularly reviewed by licensed art therapists, so that every session meets children where they are, both emotionally and developmentally. Materials and activities are never handed over without purpose. Each one is selected to serve a specific therapeutic goal, whether it's emotional regulation, self esteem, or what our therapists call dream building, the practice of helping a child imagine and articulate a future for themselves.

To see these principles applied, explore the power of self expression in children or read about how mandalas help anxious children find calm, two closer looks at the techniques our therapists use in practice.

A drawchange partcipant shows off their beautiful art therapy artwork.

Support Children's Creative Healing

Understanding what art therapy is matters. For the children we serve, having access to it matters more. Our art therapy-based programs operate in three countries and four U.S. states in an effort to facilitate healing for youth across the globe.

Every dollar makes it possible for a child to imagine, express, and heal. 🧡

→ Donate to drawchange today!

References

American Art Therapy Association. (2024). About art therapy. https://arttherapy.org/about-art-therapy/

American Art Therapy Association. (n.d.). What is art therapy? https://arttherapy.org/what-is-art-therapy/

Bhui, K., Shakoor, S., Mankee-Williams, A., & Otis, M. (2022). Creative arts and digital interventions as potential tools in prevention and recovery from the mental health consequences of adverse childhood experiences. Nature Communications, 13, 7870. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35466-0