Art at the Start: Creative community intervention for perinatal and infant mental health

‘艺术在开始’项目一直在提供艺术治疗和创造性的游戏课程，以促进邓迪当代艺术画廊内父母和0-3岁婴儿的健康和福祉。在我们的项目中，我们设法接触到了那些传统上不去参观美术馆的家庭，并帮助那些与孩子相处有困难的父母通过共享艺术创作与他们联系在一起。我们通过问卷调查、访谈和对家庭互动的观察，证明了家庭幸福质量的积极变化，这些互动的重点是婴儿的经历。我们的项目被列为最佳公共卫生实践的典范，并赢得了几个公共参与奖。这项拟议中的研究扩大了这一成功的方法，在苏格兰的四个艺术画廊中植入了四名艺术治疗师，以探索是否可以在不同的环境中成功地重复这一模式，拓宽进入艺术空间的途径，并支持苏格兰各地的父母和婴儿建立安全的关系。NHS依靠社区空间帮助他们为有年幼孩子的家庭提供第一线支持，这些家庭的孩子正在为他们的幸福而苦苦挣扎，但还没有资格接受紧急临床护理。然而，政府为支持父母和婴儿的心理健康而组建的一个特别工作组认识到，“社区”干预需要更可持续的资源。为了获得资金，像我们这样的服务需要强大的证据基础。通过将心理学、艺术和艺术教育的研究人员聚集在一起，我们希望探索如何量化和限定我们的服务的影响；解释它有多有效，它是如何发挥作用的，它在哪里发挥作用，以及为什么。为了做到这一点，我们将收集人们在参与我们的服务之前和之后的感受的信息，并通过探索在我们的外展计划之前和之后哪些群体倾向于参观画廊。这一点很重要，因为众所周知，接触艺术对健康和福祉具有保护性影响，但我们社区中许多被边缘化的群体难以进入文化空间。尽管我们已经计划了如何衡量我们的成果，但我们的研究计划也将随着我们的发展而调整，考虑到画廊工作人员、当地社区和NHS团队聚集在定期的利益相关者会议上的观点。这种‘行动研究’方法的核心是我们的艺术治疗团队，他们经过培训，根据客户的需求和当地情况，条件反射地调整他们提供的服务。这将帮助我们了解如何使我们的服务适应不同的文化背景。我们的最终目标是向苏格兰政府展示我们如何利用艺术的力量，为公共卫生和福祉提供具有成本效益的解决方案。给孩子生命中最好的开始很重要，因为我们的父母教会我们如何与他人互动，他们提供的爱对我们发展学业和社交能力至关重要。生活中糟糕的开始可能会代代相传，而“艺术在开始”模式提供了一种打破这种循环的方法。由于早期关系和接触艺术都被证明对健康和福祉有保护作用，我们的干预措施将对我们接触到的家庭的生活产生长期影响。为了确保这种强大的影响被设计和资助父母和婴儿心理健康服务的人听到，以及可能容纳此类干预的文化空间，我们计划了一些关键产出，包括学术论文、针对画廊部门的专业杂志文章，以及一份政策文件，总结项目成果的面对面和书面形式提交给画廊、政府和NHS团队。这将有助于我们展示如何将艺术和科学的观点结合在一起，提出针对公共卫生问题的创造性解决方案。

The 'Art at the Start' project has been offering arts therapy and creative play sessions to promote the health and wellbeing of parents and 0-3 year old infants within Dundee Contemporary Arts gallery. During our project, we have managed to reach families who don't traditionally visit art galleries and have helped parents who have had difficulties bonding with their children to connect to together with them through shared art making. We have evidenced positive changes in the quality of family wellbeing via questionnaires, interviews and observations of family interactions which focus on the experience of the infant. Our project has been listed as an example of best public health practise and won several public engagement prizes. The proposed research scales up this successful approach, embedding four art therapists within four arts galleries across Scotland to explore whether the 'Art at the Start' model can be successfully repeated in different settings, widening access to arts spaces and supporting parents and infants across Scotland to build secure relationships.The NHS rely on community spaces to help them provide the first line of support for families with young children who are struggling with their wellbeing, but don't yet qualify for urgent clinical care. However, a special task force put together by the government to support parents and infants' mental health recognises that 'community' interventions need to be more sustainably resourced. In order to gain funding, services like ours need a strong evidence base. By bringing together researchers from psychology, arts and arts education, we hope to explore how we can both quantify and qualify the impact of our service; explaining how effective it is, how and where it works, and why. We will do this by gathering information on how people feel before and after engaging with our service, and by exploring which groups of people tend to visit the galleries before and after our out-reach programme. This is important, because access to arts is known to have a protective impact on health and wellbeing, but many marginalised groups in our community struggle to access cultural spaces. Although we have planned how to measure our outcomes, our research programme will also adapt as we go, taking into account the perspectives of gallery staff, local communities and NHS teams gathered in regular 'stakeholder' meetings. At the centre of this 'action research' approach is our art therapy team, who have been trained to reflexively adapt the service they provide depending on their clients' needs and local conditions. This will help us to learn how our service can be adapted to different cultural settings.Our ultimate aim is to showcase to the Scottish Government how we can use the power of the arts to provide a cost-effective solution for public health and wellbeing. Giving children the best start in life is important, because our parents teach us how to interact with others, and the love they provide is essential for us to develop academic and social competence. Poor starts in life can be passed down through generations, and the 'Art at the Start' model offers a way to break this cycle. Since both early relationships and access to the arts have been shown to have protective benefits for health and wellbeing, our intervention stands to have a long-term impact on the lives of the families we reach. To ensure that this powerful impact is heard by those who design and fund parent and infant mental health services, and by the cultural spaces which might host such interventions, we have planned a number of key outputs, including academic papers, a professional magazine article aimed at the gallery sector, and a policy paper summarising the project's outcomes to be presented in person and in writing to gallery, government and NHS teams. This will help us to show how arts and science perspectives can be brought together to present creative solutions to public health problems.