Group Art Therapy for the Psychosocial Dimension of Epilepsy: A Perspective and a Preliminary Mixed-Methods Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article consists of a preliminary study that chronicles an 8-week group art therapy program for people with epilepsy, located in a fine-art museum setting. The study is situated in theories of psychosocial stigma. The primary purpose was to explore whether art therapy could be an effective method to address the psychosocial component of epilepsy treatment in Canada. Secondary questions explored the roles of an open-studio approach and an art therapy program delivered in a fine-art museum context. A mixed-methods (convergent, parallel) design examined the program’s impact for six adults between the ages of 18 and 45 with epilepsy. Psychosocial questionnaires and interviews were administered before and after the group program, and session artworks were examined with Appleton’s (2001) art therapy trauma paradigm. Two groups were compared based on attendance (i.e., attend versus no-attend). Participants who had attended group sessions had substantially reduced scores on questionnaires assessing stress and depression and increased scores on questionnaires assessing self-esteem and quality of life compared to participants who did not attend. The interviews revealed that art therapy increased the attend group’s ability to talk about the impact of epilepsy, to express grief, to make social connections, to navigate treatment stress, and to foster emotional regulation. Group art therapy may improve the psychosocial treatment dimension of epilepsy while acknowledging systemic stigma and social barriers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".