Landscape of loss: art therapy outdoors and traumatic bereavement

Abstract

Background: This paper describes art therapy sessions outdoors with a six-year-old child following multiple adverse childhood experiences and a recent bereavement of a relative who died by suicide.Context: Art therapy took place in a major city in Scotland. Sessions took place both at a local community centre and a nature reserve.Approach: Sessions employed an outdoor approach to art therapy that was underpinned by artistic concepts and ecopsychology.Outcomes: The child presented in this paper engaged notably differently when sessions were taken outside. He began to explore and communicate more coherently about his life experiences and the death of his relative.Conclusions: Through interacting with the natural environment during outdoor sessions, this child was able to explore and express concerns much more freely than during indoor sessions.Implications for Research: There is a need for further research focusing on outdoor art therapy due to a dearth of peer-reviewed research on this topic.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.