Special Issue

Arts Therapies for Mental Health and Well-Being, to Make the Creative Arts Therapies Focus Explicit

Submission Deadline: July 31, 2027 (Open) Submit Now

Guest Editor

Ines Testoni, Full Professor of Social Psychology

Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology (FISPPA), University of Padua, Padua 35131, Italy

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Research Interests: Creative arts therapies; psychodrama and sociodrama; social psychology; death education; bereavement and grief; end-of-life care; psychosocial well-being; resilience; psychology of religion and spirituality

About This Topic

This Special Issue invites contributions examining creative arts therapies (CATs) for mental health and psychosocial well-being across the lifespan. It brings together research and clinical perspectives on arts therapies (CATs), such as music therapy, dance movement therapy, drama therapy, psychodrama, poetry therapy, and integrated / intermodal approaches. The aim is to advance understanding of how creative, embodied, and relational processes may support emotional expression, meaning-making, resilience, and recovery, while critically examining therapeutic outcomes and the quality of available evidence. Topics of interest include anxiety and depression, trauma, grief and bereavement, existential distress, and interventions with people experiencing social vulnerability. Contributions may address individual and group work in clinical, educational, and community settings, as well as culturally responsive practice and access to care. We welcome original quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods studies, systematic and scoping reviews, theoretical contributions, and well-documented clinical case studies. Particular attention will be given to clear intervention descriptions, therapeutic processes, appropriate outcome assessment, ethical practice, and interdisciplinary collaboration. By connecting research with practice, the issue seeks to inform the responsible integration of CATs into mental health and psychosocial care.

Keywords

Creative arts therapies; mental health; psychosocial well-being; psychodrama; resilience; trauma; grief and bereavement; meaning-making

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted through the LIDSEN Submission System. Detailed information on manuscript preparation and submission is available in the Instructions for Authors. All submitted articles will be thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process and will be processed following the Editorial Process and Quality Control policy. Upon acceptance, the article will be immediately published in a regular issue of the journal and will be listed together on the special issue website, with a label that the article belongs to the Special Issue. LIDSEN distributes articles under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) License in an open-access model. The authors own the copyright to the article, and the article can be free to access, distribute, and reuse provided that the original work is correctly cited.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). Research articles and review articles are highly invited. Authors are encouraged to send the tentative title and abstract of the planned paper to the Editorial Office (icm@lidsen.com) for record. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the Editorial Office.

Welcome your submission!