National arts and wellbeing policies and implications for wellbeing in organisational life

Abstract

There is general agreement nowadays of the value of the arts to our health and wellbeing, for instance, personal experience of music to lift depression, words to express our lived emotions, the aesthetic quality of a work of visual art that can take us to deeper understanding. The arts include a “broad and diverse landscape of interrelated creative practices and professions, including performance arts (including music, dance, drama, and theatre), literary arts (including literature, story, and poetry), and the visual arts (including painting, design, film) (see UNESCO 2006)” (Wall T, 2019; p. 1). For many, their relevance to mental and physical health is a given, to sustain, to prevent deterioration, or to improve the healing process. An appreciation of their value to health and wellbeing is often due to specific personal experience. Indeed, as Victoria Hume, Director of Arts Council England’s Culture Health and Wellbeing Alliance stated in an interview, (July 2020), “People get it when they’ve done it”, observing that it is a “slow, iterative process of building champions” who are conveying the necessary messages that shift attitudes. The event of the pandemic and lockdown in 2020 has caused many to consider again their priorities and how they can better sustain their own situations, as Dr Clive Parkinson, international arts and health advocate, Director of Arts for Health at Manchester Metropolitan University UK, and Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales Australia, observed (July 2020) “The importance of culture and the arts in all their forms, to impact of health, wellbeing and social change, has never felt so relevant”.