The Arts: Health Effects

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Wednesday 11th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Vaizey]

Health and wellbeing is much on our minds at the moment, and I am co-chair of the all-party group on arts, health and wellbeing, so this is a great opportunity to debate the significant role that arts-based interventions can play in addressing a wide variety of health and social care issues.

In July the all-party group published an inquiry into that important issue—I am holding it up to get the appropriate screengrab, which can go viral on social media. I can see that the Minister is holding it up as well. If someone could pass it to the Opposition spokesman to hold up, we could get a full house. The report was the result of two years of research and discussions with individuals and organisations from the worlds of health, arts, academia and politics. I assure the House, because I had nothing to do with it, that it is of the highest quality. The people who can take credit are Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, who effectively wrote it, Alexandra Coulter, who runs the all-party group with such effectiveness, and my colleague Lord Alan Howarth, the chairman, who invited me to become the co-chairman.

The inquiry and report provide considerable evidence to support the idea that arts-based approaches can help people to stay well, recover faster, manage long-term conditions and experience better quality of life. It is important to stress that arts engagement and participation can have a positive impact at every stage of a person’s life. I was struck, for example, when reading the report—I should have known this fact—that one in five mothers suffers from a mental health condition at the time of, or in the first year after, childbirth. The report shows some of the interventions that can help. In Stockport an arts on prescription pilot offered visual art and music projects to women who had or were at risk of postnatal depression. Every woman who participated experienced improvements in their general health, and all but one experienced a reduction in their level of depression. Funding for that service was lost, but similar programmes have been replicated around the UK, with comparable results.

Childhood is another important area where the arts can have a huge impact. I leave aside the effect that music and arts education in schools can have on children’s wellbeing, as well as their educational attainment, although no doubt it is a subject that we will return to in future debates, but it is estimated that possibly 850,000 children suffer from mental health and related physical health problems. Some of the most serious mental health problems can manifest before the age of 24—indeed, in half of cases they manifest before the age of 14.

Such mental health problems can be prevented or mitigated through early intervention. The Alchemy Project, which uses dance as an early intervention in psychosis, had a remarkable effect on mental health. Two groups of young participants with no experience of dance were pushed to work with professional artists. At the end of the pilot both cohorts demonstrated clinically significant improvements in wellbeing, communication, quality of life and many other variants.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

A 44-year-old woman in my constituency suffered from depression and anxiety, and she tells me she is not yet recovered from her illness but is now strong enough to go every day to an amazing place called the Huthwaite Hub, which relies in large part on lottery funding. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that former coalfield communities do not get their fair share of funding from the lottery, which would enable more projects like that to help many more people?

[Mr Vaizey]

The hon. Lady is a very distinguished former arts spokesman, and I know that when she was the Labour party’s spokesman for the arts she highlighted the fairness of lottery funding distribution. Again, without wishing to dodge the question, that is another debate. I am pleased that the Arts Council, for example, is now much more focused on ensuring that more money goes outside London than it has in the past. She makes a fair point that, fundamentally, there is a project in her constituency making a real difference to one of her constituents, and that is to be applauded without any quibbles from me at all.

Let me run through a few brief examples, because I know that many Members want to speak. An arts on prescription programme run by Arts and Health in Cambridgeshire found that three quarters of participants saw a decrease in anxiety. There is clear and growing evidence that with illness and long-term conditions, arts engagement can alter the morphology of the brain and help speed recovery from neural damage. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Humber NHS Foundation Trust have run Strokestra, a pilot collaboration where, through music-based active sessions, almost every single participant who had suffered from a stroke saw a reduction in their symptoms and experienced great social benefits such as enhanced communication. A range of other studies have shown similarly positive effects. Group singing and dance has been shown to improve the voice and movement of people with Parkinson’s disease, and singing enhances lung function and the quality of life for people with chronic respiratory disorders. Arts-based interventions such as listening to music have also been shown to reduce the physiological effects of cancer and coronary heart disease.