How art is making people healthier 

From an article from Reasons to be Cheerful


Momentum has been building around programs that connect arts and health for decades, but a recent spate of research has underscored just how intrinsically the two are linked.

A 2019 World Health Organization report found that the arts help promote health in several ways, including by encouraging healthy behaviours, and supporting child development and caregiving. Meanwhile, artistic interventions can help people manage mental illness, neurological conditions and noncommunicable diseases, as well as support end-of-life care. The research is fuelling a push to make arts more accessible for everyone from childhood through adulthood.

In a review of 95 studies of programs across 27 countries, researchers found that arts initiatives may reduce the risk of noncommunicable diseases, which account for 74 percent of preventable deaths worldwide. Arts programs can lead people to engage in healthier behaviours, like movement through dance. They also reduce social isolation, which is linked to poor health outcomes.

Evidence is showing how effective arts interventions are for specific conditions. Dance classes have been found to improve participants’ gaits after the class ends. A singing program for new mothers with postpartum depression found participants ultimately showed lower levels of depression and improved well-being.

Today, about half of U.S. hospitals have some kind of arts program. One has uniquely interwoven its arts program with its medical practice. Doctors and nurses make referrals to Arts in Medicine, which includes a roster of in-house artists who are on the hospital payroll. In 2025, practitioners with the program had 13,000 arts engagements with the health system’s patients, ranging from dance classes for expecting mothers in high-risk pregnancies, to painting or making mosaics with young patients.

One cultural challenge, she says, is that many people feel reluctant to try something artistic if they aren’t good at it. But artists help them take incremental steps to explore creativity, which can help achieve feelings of greater meaning and connection.

Benefits can also come by improving accessibility to arts and creativity throughout communities, like in schools. While programmes linking arts and health have taken root in communities for years, efforts are now growing to strengthen and build out a more coordinated approach.

In Arts in Medicine, Florida, artists, health care providers, researchers, local officials and others have been coming together to build out arts programs to support youth mental health and creative aging. In Kansas City, a similar mix of local stakeholders has been working on approaches to social prescribing. These collaborative groups are organized as pilots in a model called Community Neuroarts Coalitions seeking to bring together a diverse mix of people to build out arts programs already underway and develop new ones, all while promoting evidence-based practices and adding to the growing body of research.

The coalitions are all hyperlocal, addressing problems in their communities through a systematic process that results in very different outcomes. Late last year, the network expanded to 11 coalitions across the country, with plans to replicate the model in more communities globally.

Read the full article here.