Creating ‘art-alongside’ in Peer Art Therapy (PATh) groups: nurturing connection and trust, and responding to power dynamics

ABSTRACT Background: Creating ‘art-alongside’ in peer art therapy groups: connection, trust, and power dynamics. Practice Contexts: Online, private practice; peer-focused PATh group and PATh group with people within the LGBTQA + community. Face-to-face, non-government organisation; art therapy groups with people living with cancer. Approach: Peer art therapists enter therapeutic spaces alongside their own Lived Experience of mental-health challenges. In PATh, art therapists create art-alongside participants in group art therapy. Outcomes: Through creating art-alongside peer art therapists can demonstrate embodied understanding of and modelling of surviving mental ill-health experiences as well as deliver authentic empathy for participants with current struggles. Art-alongside can be a mutually-connecting, co-learning, beneficial practice for participants and therapist. Creating art-alongside in PATh groups can create safer spaces for participants and provide grounded therapist-as-peer role modelling. Conclusions: Creating art-alongside participants in PATh applies peer-work and art therapy understandings and skills. It dismantles therapist/participant power locations of traditional art therapy and can be a process of mutuality and connection for participants and therapist. Implications for Research: Co-produced research with participants and therapists on the experience of art-alongside in PATh groups and co-produced research across ‘companion art’, ‘reflection-art’ and art-alongside in PATh, evidencing the impact of therapist-articulated Lived Experience. In addition, research is needed into the inclusion of an art-alongside PATh model in art therapy training. Plain-language summary Peer Art Therapy (PATh) is the framework used for practitioners who are trained and experienced in both art therapy and mental health peer work. Peer work is the practice of using our own Lived Experiences to support someone also living with similar ones and being equals within our spaces. In our context we specifically mean ‘experiences of mental health issues’. It combines the theories, skills, tasks and practices of both fields to work alongside and responsively to clients. Peer art therapists – the authors included – share with clients, aspects of their own personal experiences of living with mental health challenges. In this article, we talk about the practical application of this approach and how peer art therapists create ‘art-alongside’ the participants in their groups. This practice can benefit both the participants and therapists and creates strong connected relationships where both are learning. Our article discusses the concepts and theories of this approach and the positive responses it creates, including: building safer spaces, peer/role modelling, increased empathy for and understanding and survival of complex mental health challenges. The authors use personal examples of art created alongside from our clinical settings – online peer-focussed peer art therapy group and peer art therapy group with LGBTIQA + clients and art therapy groups in a non-government organisation, with people living with cancer. Our work also dismantles the need for therapist as expert in the practice of art therapy. We recommend a number of areas for future research about the value of peer art therapists making art alongside clients - research that includes both clients and therapists.