Expressive Arts Therapy for Management of Loneliness and Psychological Well Being

Abstract

Loneliness is often used interchangeably with the term isolation. Isolation can be feeling alone, but loneliness is feeling alone in a group full of people or while living alone. It is not just a feeling; many emotions, like anger, sadness, frustration, etc, accompany it. According to the Loneliness Model, an individual starts feeling unsafe in their environment, making them hypervigilant of people around them and increasing their loneliness. Lonely individuals often fights a lot of battles with themselves during the day. One’s psychological well-being can also get hampered in this process. There are six variables under psychological well-being: Self-Acceptance, Purpose in Life, Personal Growth, Environmental Mastery, Positive Relations with Others, and Autonomy. The study focuses on managing loneliness and psychological well-being in females with Expressive Arts Therapy. The therapy is a collaboration of modalities like art, writing, movement, poetry, narrative writing, play, and clay therapy. The study is done using pre and post-treatment with a control group design (20 participants: 10 participants in the Experimental group and 10 in the Control Group). An intervention plan for five weeks was planned, and activities were designed focusing on loneliness, psychological well-being, and all the variables under it. Using the Mann-Whitney U test, we analyzed the changes in the feelings of loneliness and psychological well-being in both groups, which were significant at 0.05. Using the Wilcoxon Sign Rank Test, the pre and post-intervention scores were analyzed separately for both groups. In the Experimental Group, the results revealed a significant change at 0.05 level within-group design.