47 THE EFFECT OF ENVIRONMENTAL ART DESIGN ON THE MENTAL HEALTH OF SCHIZOPHRENIC PATIENTS
Authors: Zhang Yuan 
Published: February 2025

Abstract

Background
Schizophrenia is often accompanied by perceptual, thinking, emotional and behavioral disorders, belonging to a chronic, disabling mental illness. Schizophrenia has the characteristics of low treatment rate, poor compliance and high recurrence rate. At present, the clinical mechanism and influencing factors of schizophrenia are not clear, and the treatment varies according to the different stages and symptoms of the disease. Psychological and artistic intervention methods have attracted the attention of clinicians and patients. Among them, the positive impact of environmental art design intervention on the mental health of patients with schizophrenia remains to be confirmed. In this regard, the study extends this intervention means to the psychological intervention course of patients with schizophrenia to explore its effect on the mental health of patients.

Methods
The 80 patients who met the diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia in the tenth edition of the International Classification of Diseases were evenly and randomly divided into the experimental group and the control group, and the intervention period was 6 months. The control group received routine nursing; The experimental group received the intervention of environmental art design experience, and improved the mental and psychological symptoms through various art experience methods, and received the intervention 3 times a week for 1 hour. The two groups were tested with various scales before and after the intervention. Measurement scales include the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES), the Patient Health Questionnaire-9, and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9. PHQ-9, Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), Selfesteem Scale (Selfesteem Scale) SES) and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7 (GAD-7) scale.

Results
The comparison results of GAD-7 scale and SES scale of different subjects before and after intervention are shown in Table 1. As can be seen from Table 1, there was no significant statistical difference in GAD-7 and SES scales before intervention between different experimental groups (P&gt;0.05). After receiving routine care, the two scores of the control group decreased, but the degree of decrease was small; After receiving the intervention of environmental art design, the GAD-7 score of the experimental group decreased from 57.296±4.663 to 42.007±4.267, and the SES score increased from 23.575±2.904 to 34.274±4.407, with statistically significant differences between the experimental group and the control group (P&lt;0.05). In addition, the PHQ-9 scores of both groups decreased, but the scores of the experimental group were lower, and the difference was statistically significant compared with the control group (P&lt;0.05). Finally, the total CD-RISC score and GSES score of the experimental group were significantly increased, and the difference was statistically significant compared with the control group (P&lt;0.05).

Discussion
Environmental art design promotes the mental health of patients with schizophrenia by providing artistic experience, which provides a channel for patients to release their emotions. Through artistic activities, the patient’s attention is effectively diverted and negative emotions such as anxiety and depression are relieved. The results showed that the environmental art design greatly improved the psychological condition of patients in the process of intervention, and the scores of various scales were improved.