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

Chapter Two: Review of the recent literature over 20 years.
1. Is there a way through the jungle? relevant literature to this study
Anyone who tries to review the literature on art and mental health encounters a huge
body of literature, most of which is of poor quality. It is difficult to ascertain what is
known about how the characteristics of mental disorder may manifest pathologically in
the artwork of those affected since a published comprehensive and systematic review of
the more recent literature over the last 20 years is not available. Chapter Two aims to
collect all the available interpretable evidence of pathological characteristics in the artwork
of psychiatric patients from published papers over the last 20 years. It was more
appropriate to categorise the literature under methodology rather than concepts as the
literature is constrained by the methodological difficulties which encumber it.
The literature search method
Studies met the following inclusion criteria:
(a) Subjects for case and controlled studies were adults or adolescent: the evidence
suggests that children's drawings show considerably more inter-individual
variation than those of adults 92 , and there are also developmental complications,
so it seemed sensible to narrow the subject categories in the comparable studies,
to those whose motivations, psychopathology and clinical picture there is access.
The impressionistic papers showed more range of illustration for general
92
Maureen Cox (1992), Children's Drawings , Harmondsworth: Penguin.
46