Adolescents with serious depression can feel stuck in their symptoms and ways of thinking, making it harder for them to recover from their mental illness. A series of two-week-long summer “Creativity Camps” developed by two University of Minnesota professors has provided a new treatment approach for adolescents with depression, helping them to get unstuck by encouraging participants’ creativity. The results are impressive, the camp’s creators said, with many participants showing significant, lasting reduction in their depression symptoms.
Kathryn Cullen, professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and an M Health Fairview child and adolescent psychiatrist, developed the camp along with Yuko Taniguchi, assistant professor of medicine and arts at the University of Minnesota Rochester’s Center for Learning and Innovation. The half-day intensive outpatient program (IOP) camps, which offered six sessions in the summers of 2022 and 2023 for adolescents who had been diagnosed with depression, were largely held at the University of Minnesota’s Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain.
With her long history of working with adolescents, Cullen said she has treated many young patients who have hit roadblocks, trapped by their depression and unable to make progress.
“I’ve been working with young people for many years, helping them, prescribing medications for them, recommending therapy, researching new types of treatments,” she said. “It was hard to see those kids who just weren’t improving. I was looking for a new approach that could help these patients move forward.”
Many of the Creativity Camp participants have tried treatments that have not been fully effective. “We are always in need of great treatments for adolescents with treatment-resistant depression,“ Cullen said. “I have the experience of working with young people who have tried many treatments but get more hopeless and withdrawn and stuck in their own world.”
Taniguchi’s deep interest in art — her unique dual professorship was created in recognition of her groundbreaking work using art and creativity to aid the healing process — helped her to see the possibilities of harnessing creativity to aid young people struggling with their mental health.
“Kids with depression can be stuck in really rigid thinking,” she said. “They are determined to see the world as black and white. Their negativity is intense. Creative thinking, on the other hand, is flexible. It can be infused through inspiration by holding them accountable to become artists.”
Cullen and Taniguchi liked the idea of presenting an option that, for participants, felt significantly different from classic treatment modalities. The idea of a camp where young people were encouraged to tap into their creative sides, where they spent focused time working on art, felt like a good option.
“There’s more appeal to a camp than a therapy group,” Cullen said. After she and Taniguchi talked about possible approaches, she said, “We really got excited about the idea of doing a creativity camp.”
The camp’s focus on art and creativity is more than camouflage, Taniguchi said. It’s also a new way of looking at the world. “What if we were saying to a young person, ‘What you are doing is practicing to be an artist?’ That approach is much more interesting than saying, ‘You are working on your mental health.’ What if being an artist is the priority and feeling better is a consequence? That’s a foundation of our practice.”
The team was eventually awarded comprehensive funding through a Minnesota Futures Grant from the University of Minnesota to support the project, Cullen said. “Our grant was to not just do a camp and study its impact on mental health but to also study the brains of participants and how thinking creatively impacted them.”
During the camps, researchers measured participants’ quantitative and qualitative responses to creative work, through functional MRI scans to measure brain activity and in-depth interviews (also conducted with parents and other caregivers) that analyzed participants’ depression levels before, during and after their time at the camp.
As the camps wrapped up, the research team analyzed the data. The first resulting paper, published in the journal Child Psychiatry and Human Development, Cullen said, “reports on the improvement in depression symptoms from both summers. We found that, for participants, there was a significant improvement in depression symptoms after participating in the camp. They also showed improvement in different measurements of well-being.” While there is still room for more research, she added, “The results were quite encouraging.”
Building from an idea
Cullen met Taniguchi in 2018, after her department chair suggested they collaborate..
“I was working on creating an after-school mental health program for teenagers that was at the level of an IOP program,” Cullen said. “Somehow my department chair had met Yuko and learned about this program that she was doing with adolescents at the Mayo Clinic. We met, got to talking and I learned about her approach.”
They eventually got involved in a program called Arts and Health sponsored by the University of Minnesota Medical School and the Weisman Art Museum that connects artists and researchers
The Arts and Health program encourages participants to take time to imagine the possible fruits of their collaboration, Taniguchi explained: “They say, ‘Have a conversation for a year and see what you come up with.’”.
One of the many ways the two professors connected was around the idea of art as a potential way to pull young people out of depression.
“When I first met Yuko,” Cullen said, “I told her that the one thing that seemed to get kids with depression out of their shell was when I would talk to them about their artwork or music. It gave them a little spark.” That realization felt promising, she continued: “We needed something that would tap into that a little more and help young people express themselves and be creative.”
The idea of turning this promising realization into a summer camp was spurred on by Abimbola Asojo, distinguished global professor at the University’s College of Design. “She had been doing these camps every year to encourage kids from underrepresented groups to go into design fields,” Cullen said. “She’d brought in mainly BIPOC kids to the U to do these design-focused camps. She said, ‘Why don’t you do a camp? We’ve been doing these camps. They’re really successful and a fun entry point.’”
During Creativity Camp sessions, staff made a point of telling the young participants that the creative work they were doing was important, that they were artists worthy of respect. “We take the camp participants very seriously,” Taniguchi said. “They are there to create art every day. We recruited professional artists to mentor them and work closely with them during the camps.”
The focus of the camps was on accepting the young participants for who they are, and encouraging their creativity in whatever form it took, Cullen said. “The activities are geared towards getting kids to tap into their imagination, to express themselves differently, be weird, be free of judgment about what they create. There are no right answers, no right way to express yourself. It is just what you make.”
At the end of the camps, participants’ creations were exhibited at the Weisman Art Museum. The public exhibition was important, Taniguchi said. “We treated them like the serious artists they are.”
‘Kids need things like this’
Going in, Cullen and Taniguchi felt confident their research would show that Creativity Camp would have a positive effect on participants’ mental health. As they analyzed their results, Cullen said the positive outcome “wasn’t surprising, because it sort of fit our expectations. We’d done this kind of work in our programs before, and Yuko had already been doing something similar with kids at Mayo for years.” The difference was the ability to collect hard data about the camp’s impact through MRI scans. “We wanted to collect data that would show others in a definitive way. We were happy that we were able to show it statistically and convincingly, but I wouldn’t say we were surprised.”
To further back up their research, Cullen and Taniguchi conducted a similar study with a group of undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota. “We found similar improvement in mental health and depression and an increased well-being,” Cullen said. They also conducted another study on young adults in Japan: “We were able to show that students’ well-being improved there, too.”
The research team conducted six-month follow-up interviews with Creativity Camp participants and their parents. While all respondents stated that participants continued to experience fewer depression symptoms than before the camps, the teens reported that their depression symptoms had increased in the six months after completing the camp but were still better than the baseline measurements. Parents tended to note that improvement in the teens’ depression symptoms was sustained.
Thanks to all of this checking and rechecking, Cullen and Taniguchi feel like they have developed a robust intervention that could be helpful in treating depression in teens.
“We’re pretty sure it works,” Cullen said. “I think it’s helping young people tap into something that they don’t really get the chance to do, and to think about themselves in a different way and really enjoy spending time with other people. It is a very meaningful, enjoyable experience that we’re thinking may be one of the key ingredients to their symptom improvement.”
In the end, the key seems to be finding something that breaks depressed teens out of the cycle of depression, Cullen said: “Kids need experiences that get them out of their stuck ways of thinking and give them an opportunity to reflect and connect with others and find a new way of seeing the world that’s different from the rut that they’ve settled into.”
Andy Steiner
Andy Steiner is a Twin Cities-based writer and editor. Before becoming a full-time freelancer, she worked as senior editor at Utne Reader and editor of the Minnesota Women’s Press. Email her at asteiner@minnpost.com.
