Talk:Art therapy

message: This should be an important article. I'm concerned about a number of points. I'm surprised to see reference to 'Malchiodi' appearing so often when there are many important articles and texts that could have been included in addition. The history of the development of Art Therapy is lacking. I was surprised to see hardly any mention of Adrian Hill. The article is American-centric. Other parts of the world also have state (country) registration of Art Therapists. I do not practise Art Therapy but my interest is as a psychologist who edits books on therapeutic approaches and therefore I think entries to Wikipedia need to take a worldview. This article needs to take a broader look at Art Therapy.
Stephenpalmer (talk) 10:19, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  General 

message: International Expressive Arts Therapy Association belongs under Wiki page, Expressive Therapy. It is not an art therapy organization. Whoever is now controlling the editing is controlling this page to the point that it is incorrect and no longer valuable in its representation of the international field of art therapy.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cmalch (talk • contribs) 23:08, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  REFERENCES 

message: To be added 
subjects	
        	art therapy schools
        	art therapy issues
        	art therapy books and journals
        	art therapy & therapeutic arts conferences
-- Mattbrundage 19:33, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  moved this table from main article 

message: This section was moved here from /Comments subpage by EnviroboyTalkCs 23:37, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Assessment' vs. 'diagnosis' 

message: i don't know how to use the wikipedia tag, but i've seen it before. the intro talks as if california and the united states are the biased center of the planet. i see b-class on this page. perhaps it's the same cause and solution. Nastajus (talk) 16:30, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I have added this banner to the article. I hope I did it properly. The Intro does seem to be focused on the US almost entirely. These references should be cleaned up. I can help clean it up if that is okay. If I was too hasty placing this template just let me know.Riwo (talk) 02:42, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: needs world view warning at top

message: Is it possible to ID the most active users on this page and ping their talks for references? SGGH ping! 12:48, 30 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: References

message: This article was edited as part of the San Francisco WikiWomen's Edit-a-thon. The editor who attended the event may be a new editor. In an effort to support new editor's & a healthy environment, please assume good faith to their contributions before making changes. Thank you! Sarah (talk) 20:23, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article was edited as part of an edit-a-thon 

message: In the fifth paragraph in this section (not counting the block quote), the last sentence of the paragraph suggests a contrast between the type of art therapy that Dr. Naumburg developed and the type that Dr. Kramer developed, separated by "while".  However, the comparison is incomplete.  The sentence specifies (at the end) out of what Dr. Kramer developed her art therapy but, other than naming it, does not give anything to indicate how Dr. Naumburg's art therapy was different from Dr. Kramer's.  It needs a phrase -- a few words -- to indicate this, for example, from what it developed, on what it was based, or on what it focused. It would be nice if someone who knows about Dr. Naumburg's art therapy could add a few words after the name of her therapy.CorinneSD (talk) 23:36, 17 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  History 

message: The third, fourth, fifth and sixth sentences of the second paragraph in this section do not make much sense.  I don't even know where to begin.  Someone who knows about art therapy, or just art, and can write, needs to read these sentences and improve them so that a non-expert can make sense of them.CorinneSD (talk) 23:52, 17 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Art therapy and outsider art 

message: I suggest the Outsider Art wikipedia article be added to the Art Therapy page on Open Directory, preparatory to the necessary editing of the Outsider Art section of the Wikipedia article Art Therapy.  Thank you to whomsoever handles this.  Anne9853 (talk) 18:11, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links 

message: I suggest that digital art should be listed as an art medium used in art therapy within the purpose of the article. With the increased use of technology within art therapy this medium should be addressed. This is a minor edit that opens a whole new chapter into the world of art therapy. Within the Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association is some great information on this topic. Sairalyn Ansano Thong has an article call, "Redefining the Tools of Art Therapy." You can view the article here: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ777017.pdf Adreenah (talk) 20:41, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Defining the Mediums of Art used in Art Therapy 

message: I removed this since it was presented as if it were a section of the ATCB Code of Professional Practice, and it no longer is.  It is also unnecessarily detailed for an overview article, and is not as global in outlook as the article should be.  It is here in its entirety if others would care to revert it in all or part.  Anne9853 (talk) 05:35, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Independent Practitioning

message: This is a post to explain some changes I've just made and some general ways in which I think this page could be improved and problems avoided in future. My basic point is that a lot of this article made claims without citing a source; made claims citing only somewhat irrelevant, unreliable, or insufficient sources; or was somewhat selective or misleading about what the sources say. Since these claims were essentially about the effectiveness of a health intervention, the standards of evidence should be relatively high here, and Wikipedia should try even harder than normal to avoid being misleading on matters like this. (For further info on that, see WP:MEDRS, which is also linked to at the top of this talk page.)
The first substantial change I made was removing the sentence "The efficiency of treatment interventions for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children have not been researched extensively." The Linda Chapman source cited does indeed say "Although post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children has been extensively studied during the past 15 years, little research exists regarding the efficacy of treatment interventions." However, that's just one source, which is also from an art therapy journal. That doesn't mean it can't be used or that it's inherently biased, but that's a big claim, and a rather vague/subjective a claim as well (what would qualify as “extensive” research?). Thus, any one particular source for such a claim probably shouldn't be parroted by Wikipedia; Wikipedia can report what the source says as something the source says, rather than stating it in Wikipedia's own voice and thereby endorsing it as accurate. 
And that probably goes even more so for a source that there's reason to believe might want to emphasise or endorse a certain viewpoint. For example, the American Psychological Association has no particular reason to take a stance that one form of psychotherapy is better than another, but an art therapy association of course does. Again, this isn't a strong claim that this particular source is biased, just that there's some reason to believe it could be; and again, I'm not saying such sources can't be used, just that perhaps they should be used somewhat more cautiously, and not relied on by themselves.
More to the point, I was pretty sure there was in fact a lot of research on the efficacy of PTSD treatments for children, as I've encountered some of it before and as it'd be very odd for such an important topic to be ignored by everyone but art therapists. So I searched "Treatment for PTSD in children" in Google scholar, and got 211,000 results. I expect many of them will not really be research on treatment for PTSD in children but instead will just use those keywords at some point, but skimming through the first pages of results, most looked like they were about that topic. And even if it was a few as 1% that were on that topic, that'd still be over 2,000 studies. So that makes the point that Wikipedia shouldn't just uncritically parrot big and vague claims made by a single source, particularly one we might have reason to believe could have some degree of bias.
Also, as a small point, in this article "efficacy" was swapped for "efficiency", which is not the right term. This is just a minor mistake, but it's one of many, and they add up to make this article somewhat confusing, misleading, and inaccurate. It seems to me there's a need for editors with some background knowledge on the subject to go over this article and fix it up, and keep an eye on it in future. (I know a decent amount about psychology in general, but not about art therapy, and I'm low on time at the moment, so I've only done part of the work.)
The second substantial change I made was deleting the whole paragraph about art therapy for eating disorders. I'm generally very hesitant to just simply delete substantial sections of content from Wikipedia articles, as it was likely have been added in good faith, so I prefer to do everything I can to find some value in it and just cut it down, rephrase it, find sources, etc. However, in this case, I felt it was necessary to delete the paragraph. 
The first reason for that was that the two sources cited for that paragraph were both entirely unacceptable. One was a dead link, so I found an archive of the page (https://web.archive.org/web/20141209230602/http://www.mirasol.net:80/integrative-treatment/art-therapy.php), and it turned out it was a page from a residential eating disorder center describing the art therapy service which they provide. This is of course neither a reliable nor a neutral source. This is not a research paper, but rather a business advertising their services. A source like that would be inappropriate anywhere on Wikipedia, but should especially be avoided for articles relating to health, medicine, treatments, etc., like this one. 
The second source was just the "About us" page for the American Art Therapy Association. This is clearly inappropriate, firstly because it's not anything approaching a research article, but even more so because it's not about eating disorders at all. In fact, it turned out eating disorders weren't even mentioned on that page, and I searched "eating disorders" in the site's search function and found just one brief mention of the term on a page listing featured members of the association, which says "Elizabeth Hlavek, ATR-BC, LCPA has a private practice in Annapolis, MD and works primarily with individuals struggling with eating disorders and related concerns, such as anxiety and depression." So nowhere on the site is there anything to support the claims that were made in this paragraph, except in the sense of there being tangential evidence (on a different page to the one cited here) that art therapy has been used for eating disorders by at least one person, with no information on how it was used or how effectively.
Furthermore, the claims this paragraph made were quite strong, of the sort that would be justifiable only if (a) there was a wealth of evidence on the effectiveness of art therapy and the mechanisms of its effects, to the point that there was consensus among the experts in the field, and (b) a lot of that research and reviews indicating that consensus were cited here. That is not the case at all. So the very most this paragraph should've been saying is, for example, not "There are a few reasons why this type of treatment is helpful when treating eating disorders" but rather something like "Art therapists have proposed several reasons why this type of treatment may be helpful when treating eating disorders." That is, in the absence of a wealth of research with consistent, positive findings, this Wikipedia article should only report what people have claimed on these matters, with it being made explicit that these are things they've claimed, rather than Wikipedia just accepting the claims. And in this case, one of the sources didn't even make the claims, while the other didn't make most of them either and was entirely inappropriate anyway. 
As such, I thought the safest and best thing to do was just to delete the entire paragraph, because it's extremely important for Wikipedia to avoid making claims that are false or unsupported by existing evidence, perhaps especially on health-related topics. If any claims like those that were made in this paragraph are indeed worth making, another editor can add the appropriate versions of those particular claims back in, with appropriate and reliable citations. But I think it was best to first remove these entirely unjustified claims.
The third (and less substantial) substantial change I made was to the paragraph after the eating disorders one. Firstly, I rephrased "Art therapy can be used to help at-risk children, which is stated in Stella A. Stephney's book titled, "Art Therapy With Students At Risk: Fostering Resilience and Growth through Self-Expression"" to "In Stella A. Stephney's book Art Therapy With Students At Risk: Fostering Resilience and Growth through Self-Expression, Stephney states that art therapy can be used to help at-risk children". This was to employ that principle stated above of just reporting on what people claim, rather than Wikipedia itself making those claims, in these sorts of cases where the sources don't support the idea that there is just a general consensus on the matter. A book doesn't generally have to face the same sort of peer-review process as a journal article (most books don't face peer-review at all), and a single journal article would be insufficient to establish consensus on a matter like this anyway (i.e., not just a simple fact like what's the capital of Australia, but an assessment of the efficacy of a medical/psychological treatment).
Secondly, I removed "This is a second edition and it includes information about adolescents and how art therapy can help them work through their issues in a different way than regular therapy." I really see no reason in general to state what edition a book is in, and the rest of that sentence didn't really seem to convey any additional information of value either. It just made this read like it was adapted from an Amazon listing for the book or something like that.
Thirdly, I basically just applied that same principle of reporting on what people claim, rather than Wikipedia itself making those claims, to the following sentences about Riley's article. For example, this Wikipedia article originally stated "The article also discusses how adolescents find it more comfortable to express themselves with pictures or drawings than to talk about their feelings." However, from skimming Riley's article, it appears that (a) that article isn't reporting any research, but mainly just sort-of outlining art therapy, and (b) that Riley cites only one source when making claims about facilitating expression, and that's not specifically for the claim this article repeats, and the source is a 1981 book, so that's not a proper research paper either. So for something like that, it isn't appropriate for Wikipedia to repeat Riley's statements as facts; they're more like Riley's personal assessments on the matter. There's no need to specifically cast doubt on Riley's statements or imply they're false either (unless one is doing so while also citing reliable sources that do the same), but they can just be framed as "Riley states X" rather than as definite facts.
I hope to make some other edits as well soon, such as to the section about cancer, where this article reports on the Wood, Molassiotis, and Payne article like that article makes a series of strong claims about art therapies effectiveness, whereas in reality it reports on some evidence suggesting effectiveness but also says "the methodological shortcomings of the studies, including the modest effect sizes seen in the RCT studies, limit the usefulness of these findings beyond indicating where further research is needed." Unfortunately at the moment I'm quite busy (with a bunch of psychology assignments I should be getting to, actually...), so I don't think I'll be able to get this article properly up to scratch. Hopefully some other people can pick up the task as well. The most important thing is just to make sure that only appropriate sources are being used, and that they're being used appropriately and accurately. 
Also, just as a little post-script, I do appreciate all the hard work that must've gone into this article, and it does have a lot of useful information, and I assume everyone who's edited it has done so in good faith. There's just work that needs to be done to develop and refine it further, to make sure everything is accurate and nothing is given undue weight :) BreakfastJr (talk) 07:00, 9 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes better sources are needed. Thanks. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:26, 9 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Justification of changes and call for more appropriate use of sources 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:
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Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 15:36, 5 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion 

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