Research articleTherapeutic alliance is a factor of change in arts therapies and psychomotor therapy with adults who have mental health problems
Section snippets
Participants and procedure
The present study included 164 adult participants (68 male, 55 female, 41 without registration of gender) who were all inpatient clients in a mental health care clinic in the Netherlands. Inpatient clients who started psychomotor therapy, music therapy or art therapy were informed about the aim and procedure of this study and were asked to participate. This invitation to participate was conducted by a therapist, usually not involved in the treatment of the client. When a client agreed, she/he
Results
Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations, main effects, and interaction effects of the WAI-12 and the BSI during the three measurements. Using a general linear model with repeated measures, it was shown that there was an increase of the total score of the WAI-12 during AT [F(71) = 6.924; p = 0.010]. This increase was also seen in the WAI subscale ‘task’ [F(76) = 10.723, p = 0.002]. For the WAI subscales ‘goals’ and ‘bond’ only a trend was observed (p = 0.08; respectively p = 0.056). Next, we
Discussion
The present study was conducted to investigate the development of the therapeutic alliance, (i.e., the client-therapist bond, agreement on goals and collaboration on task) in arts therapies and psychomotor therapy over time. Furthermore, we examined whether a good therapeutic alliance was related to symptom change (depression and anxiety) among adults in mental health care. To our knowledge, this was the first study on arts therapies and psychomotor therapy to investigate whether symptom change
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