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

current professional and administrative issues. Articles generally lacked sufficient detail
to contribute to this review 97 .
Search Results
This search resulted in 751 studies of which 428 met the inclusion criteria from the
databases 98 and 24 were added from other sources 99 . To limit the data to that of direct
relevance to research, these were classified into:
impressionistic papers 253
case studies 148
controlled studies 51
Complete references for all papers appear as tables of Authorities in Appendix 3.
The literature was organised broadly and qualitatively as follows:
1. Individualistic theories or philosophy of art and healing presented as impressions,
which were examined for their perspective on the purpose of art in therapy (the
impressionistic studies introduced a number of popular views about the nature
of art and healing. It would be unwise, in an exploratory study, to exclude such
97 A search by Bloch (1988) of 20 years of Inscape articles found only 13 research-based papers (reported
by Gilroy 1992, Research in Art Therapy op.cit.) reflecting the prelevant view that "research has little
impact on psychotherapy practise".
98 Database abstracts were first screened for inclusion criteria for foreign papers difficult to obtain. Suitable
papers were obtained from British Library resources. Only a few papers were of very limited circulation
and were omitted but generally papers from the large databases were accessible.
99 Only one was a controlled study.
49