Editorial
Volume 2 Issue 2
Abstract
Sensitive, vulnerable and so fragile, humans are constantly seeking for apraisal and well-being. Ancient traditions all arround the planet teach us how our senses, emotions and thinking contribute to foster the individual and community esthetic sensibility in collaborative ways of belonging, attachement, security.
Contemporary medical practice integrates some of the arts therapies’ methods – music in anesthesia and surgery, palliative care or rehabilitation, visual arts in chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetis, sclerosis…, dance and drama in education and social work. The mental health area uses expressive and creative techniques as powerful complementary treatments. Sensible arts experiences help healing. We need arts as a regulator of our body-mind fonctioning, thus preventing destabilization, unbalance and illness.
Contemporary research in arts therapies [1] brings evidence that integrating arts practice with neuroscientific discoveries are effective methods to support mental and physical health. Biological and ecological sciences join human health issues. Alltogether scientists and artists foster « one health » philosophical and epistemological concepts.
The human society faces a critical period of multiple challenges with traumatic consequences for many populations. Arts and arts therapies offer a powerful lever for emotional regulation, thus being at the core of care, healing and well-being. As we are writing these lines, the 2023 International Conference of the European Federation of Art Therapy [2] « Growing*Together », held on 15-17 June in Riga, just closed and the conference « Arts for the Well-Being of All : New Horizons for Research » is going on at the Edge Hill University’s Research Centre for Arts and Well-Being, 20-21 June 2023, in collaboration with WHO and NHS. The time has come for effective integrative reflexion and action in health research, policies and practice, based on the fondamental creativity of the human being as part of the living and non-living world.
References