The Creative Arts Therapies (CAT) is an umbrella term covering several specialized disciplines: art therapy, dance movement therapy, drama therapy, psychodrama, music therapy, and poetry / bibliotherapy. In these healthcare professions, arts-based creative and expressive processes and their products are used to improve health and well-being within a therapeutic relationship. The first part of this chapter will provide an overview of the CAT disciplines, training requirements, and the field’s history. The second part will describe the therapeutic change factors shared by all CAT disciplines. Part three will discuss evidence-based findings from CAT studies on emotional well-being including regulating and processing emotions, stress relief, depressive symptoms and grief processing. Finally, in part four, future directions for CAT research will be suggested, with an emphasis on change process research, including mechanisms of change.

Just as illness and difficulties punctuate our lives, so do times of healing and achievement. As an experience of recovery and renewal, healing through self-expression is a creative process and a triumph of the creative trance. It can bring the possibility of a new self, new work, and new aspects of existence. Illness influenced Itchiku Kubota to expand his designs of Japanese textiles and kimonos. Addressing both emotional and physical pain, healing with creativity can occur through the creative arts therapies and in individuals. By using her creativity in hopes of healing the world, Greta Thunberg healed her difficulties with speaking. Paradoxically, impairments may augment the creative trance by becoming a transforming illness, as in Ludwig van Beethoven’s increasing deafness that imparted greater power to his music. Even when a condition is terminal, and there is no cure, there can still be healing with an altered, yet profound form of creative trance.