Patients With Schizophrenia Painting Art Assessment And Painting Art Therapy Intervention

The study includes two main parts covering assessment of artwork and using art making as medium in psychological intervention for schizophrenia in-inpatients. Artwork assessment, having been boomed in the latest half century, is not proved to have a satisfactory reliability and validity from psychometric view point. Having succeeded in coping with emotional problem, traumatic experience with a profound research, art therapy is still weak in identifying the healing of psychological function with art making activities. The objective of this research is, firstly to develop a index system assessing the artwork of schizophrenia inpatient and seek for the way to improve the assessment reliability and validity by means of psychometrics and, secondly, to facilitate the healing of schizophrenia inpatient through using group art therapy and to study the function of art making in improving the psychological mechanism for schizophrenia inpatient. The subjects are 178 inpatients, untrained in drawing, diagnosed as schizophrenia by the standard of ICD-10 and 95 normal individuals, with no obvious psychiatric symptom, untrained in drawing. The two groups are assigned with self-picture-drawing assessment (SPD) and diagnostic-drawing-series assessment system (DDS). The researcher developed a new assessment system by adding new index on the basis of original one. The result shows that 13 items, such as gender, out of 21 items in SPD assessment system and 68 items, such as color integration, out of 115 items in DDS assessment system can differentiate the schizophrenia group from the normal group. The scores of scale, preceded with logistic regression, make these differentiating items as the final system for art making assessment. Under the SPD assessment system , the internal consistency reliability, the intra-rater reliability and inter-rater reliability is respectively 0.864, 0.958, 0.945. Under the DDS assessment system, the internal consistency reliability, the intra-rater reliability and inter-rater reliability is respectively 0.904,0.971,0.950. SPD assessment system can select 72.0% and DDS assessment system 90.0% of the participants correctly. The study of art therapy intervention is designed with randomization for the controlled group and the intervention group by test-retest design. The intervention group is selected from chronic schizophrenia inpatients by the standard of ICD-10, untrained in drawing. There are 43 group members in each of the two groups. While the controlled group is arranged with the routine activities in the hospital, the intervention group accepts art therapy intervention. The intervention group has art therapy intervention, lasting for 15 weeks, twice a week, 90~120 minutes for each session. Psychiatric, psychological and artwork assessments are given to the two groups before and after the intervention. The results show that the intervention group scores higher in the Global Assessment Scale (GAS), and scores lower in the Positive and Negative Syndrome (PANS), than that of the controlled group. DDS assessment system and SPD assessment system of the intervention group score lower than the other group. The intervention group scores higher in self-concept, physical, psychological, and social function dimension of life quality than the controlled group. The findings of the research can be summarized as follows: There is a difference between schizophrenia group and normal group in the mode and index of both SPD assessment system and DDS assessment system. There is a difference in the items selected for assessing artworks between Chinese and Western subjects.. The validity and reliability of DDS assessment system for schizophrenia is quite satisfying. The validity of SPD assessment system for schizophrenia inpatient needs further improvement. Art therapy intervention improves the healing of psychiatric symptom of schizophrenia inpatient. Art therapy intervention improves the psychological function of schizophrenia inpatient. Art therapy intervention facilitates the social function of schizophrenia inpatient. Art therapy intervention upgrades the life quality and self concept of schizophrenia inpatient.