Arts-for-Health: A User Informed Framework for Promoting Mental Wellbeing Within a Marketplace

This thesis explores how arts-for-health service-providers, working in mental well-being, might better promote their market value. It responds to insights gathered throughout the research project by creating a Framework of Promotional Communication. This emergent framework can be used by arts-for-health service-providers to inform the design of their promotional material.

Taking an innovative approach to philosophy and practice, I incorporate three core values into the aims of this thesis:

1. that the framework can help arts-for-health providers gain comparable power/success to medical providers
2. that arts-for-health service-providers use transparency within their communications, to heighten the meaningfulness of their provisions to their users
3. that the arts-for-health service-providers supported through the framework are treated equitably, regardless of their disciplinary background

The inquiry applied a pragmatic methodology, and a life-world approach was incorporated to frame the input of participants. The participants engaged in oral storytelling, alongside three visual activities: 1) The Tree of Life, 2) The Scale of Influence, and 3) The Seven Orientations. These activities functioned to draw out market-relevant information from participant’s narratives. Within these activities, participants were invited to code their own data, which unveiled unique and unexpected findings. These findings were analysed through a tiered set of analyses, which were: 1) Narrative Compositional Analysis of participants well-being systems/narratives; 2) Evaluation of Scales of Influence and Seven Orientation frames for use in the framework; 3) Evaluation of Resilience Language for use in the framework; 4) Thematic Analysis of latent themes.

The results are provided through a 12-point framework which is divided into three sections:

1. The Threat to be Addressed
2. The Solution to be Deployed
3. Contextualising the Service

I propose that the use of this framework can help to improve the strength of arts-for-health services within the field of mental health and well-being, both in relation to attracting service- users and accessing support from funders.