02.04.2013 Views

The psychopathology of everyday art: a quantitative Study - World ...

The psychopathology of everyday art: a quantitative Study - World ...

The psychopathology of everyday art: a quantitative Study - World ...

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

groups, so that control conditions were identical to those <strong>of</strong> the patients. <strong>The</strong> advantage<br />

<strong>of</strong> the same conditions and environment outweighed unequal numbers.<br />

Exclusions: Most patients identified were included in study 1 and there were no<br />

exclusions for missing data. <strong>The</strong> study was voluntary and therefore did not encompass<br />

the whole population <strong>of</strong> the identified wards. One patient who was found to suffer a<br />

psychiatric disorder other than those mentioned was dropped from the study. 2<br />

unidentified pictures which were probably by student nurses were also dropped from the<br />

study.<br />

Measures<br />

Age and sex were recorded and their means are shown in Table 1.<br />

IQ was not recorded as IQ was not routinely tested and the researcher was not clinically<br />

involved with patients and had no training for such measurement. In addition, such<br />

measures are known to be unreliable with psychiatric populations, chronicity and drugs.<br />

Drugs: patients were mostly under assessment and were on low or no drugs although this<br />

was not always true, many were suffering from the effects <strong>of</strong> previous use <strong>of</strong> unidentified<br />

substances.<br />

Chronicity <strong>of</strong> patients: It was initially decided to examine work by new patients in<br />

acute stages <strong>of</strong> illness and wards were selected with this aim to control for traditionally<br />

identified indicators which have been described previously as common to the institutional<br />

environment or the long term effects <strong>of</strong> drugs. However, patients were difficult to<br />

231

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!