Creating the Bridges: Art Therapy for the Family with the Special Child

The main purpose of the project is to provide wellbeing and welfare for those families who have children with disabilities in terms of Baltic-Nordic dimension. During the project there will be organized art therapy based sessions for the target groups - both siblings and parents of the children with disabilities. In addition, the project will result in a pilot-research study and online manual, based on the exploratory study with these target groups (parents and siblings). Art therapy is an integrative health and human service profession that enriches the lives of individuals, families, and communities through active art-making, creative processes, applied psychological theory, and human experience within a psychotherapeutic relationship.

Our study showed that DMT has the potential to reduce the feelings of loneliness and facilitate social participation of family caregivers of children with disabilities. A research design that places higher priority on quantitative data provides an opportunity to stress the effectiveness of the intervention (making it more easy to explain to policy makers), while still allowing for in-depth perspectives from the qualitative perspective. We found that observation protocols by trained non-participant observers can be a valuable tool for evaluating DMT intervention and reducing bias in reporting. The results of our study showed that family caregivers of children with disabilities experienced positive changes and experienced the feelings of self-care, trust, connectivity/support from their fellow participants as by participating in the DMT sessions.