Call for evidence: visual arts, mental health and wellbeing

Deadline: 26 June 2017

How does participating in visual arts impact the subjective wellbeing of adults (18-65 year olds) who have been diagnosed with a mental health condition? We are carrying out a review of all available evidence to find out.

If you work in an organisation that runs, funds, or works in any way with visual arts for adults experiencing mental health issues, we need your evaluation reports* – whether printed, digital or visual evidence – to help us tell the whole story.

Criteria for submission and review

We will accept sources for review and possible inclusion in our systematic review using the following criteria.

• submissions must be evaluation reports only.
• reports submitted must have been completed in the past three years (2014-present) and include author details (individuals, groups or organisations).
• evaluation methods may be qualitative methods, quantitative methods or mixed methods.
• the central report objective must be the measurement of wellbeing outcomes and/or evaluation of the processes by which wellbeing outcomes are achieved in visual arts interventions or initiatives related to adults with mental health conditions.

We can only consider your evaluations if they are submitted through this call for evidence. Evidence submitted to individual researchers in the programme cannot be considered. If you have previously sent documents to the culture and sport team please re-submit through this call.

Please send your evaluations to evidence@whatworkswellbeing.org with the subject header: visual arts evidence review.

Link to PROSPERO record

*These evaluations form part of what is known as grey literature: “literature that is not formally published in sources such as books or journal articles” (Lefebvre, Manheimer, & Glanville, 2008, p. 106). This may be produced by charities, government departments, businesses, community groups and others; and may include reports, theses or dissertations, trials, and more. To find out more about why we include work not published academically and qualitative evidence, and the rigorous standards of our evidence collection, you can read our Methods Guide.