Celebrating Creative Arts Therapies Week: Creativity as a Pillar of Health

Creative Arts Therapies (CAT) Week is a meaningful time to recognize the many ways the creative process supports emotional wellness, connection, and healing. Observed during the third full week of March, this week highlights a family of professions that use the arts within therapeutic relationships to support health and well-being. In 2026, Creative Arts Therapies Week runs from March 15 through March 21.

This year, the message feels especially timely. Recent wellness reporting in the New York Times has helped bring a broader public conversation to something many therapists already know firsthand: creativity is not just a hobby or an extra. It can be a real part of caring for our mental and physical health. That same theme has been echoed in recent coverage of Dr. Daisy Fancourt’s work on the health benefits of arts engagement, which argues that creativity deserves to be understood as a pillar of health alongside other core wellness practices.

Creative Arts Therapies Week gives us a chance to pause and celebrate the professions built around that truth.

What are Creative Arts Therapies?

The National Coalition of Creative Arts Therapies Associations describes creative arts therapists as credentialed human service professionals who use distinct arts-based methods and creative processes to ameliorate illness and optimize health and wellness. NCCATA identifies five member professions: art therapy, dance/movement therapy, drama therapy, music therapy, and poetry therapy.

These approaches share a common belief: not everything can be processed through words alone. Sometimes people need movement, image, sound, story, or metaphor to express what they are feeling and make sense of what they are carrying.

Art Therapy

Art therapy is a mental health profession that supports individuals, families, and communities through active art-making, the creative process, applied psychological theory, and human experience within a psychotherapeutic relationship. It is not about being artistic or making something “good.” It is about using art as a way to explore emotions, increase insight, and support healing.

Art therapy can be especially helpful for people who feel overwhelmed, stuck, anxious, burned out, deep grief, or disconnected from themselves. It offers another pathway into self-understanding, especially when words feel hard to find.

Music Therapy

Music therapy uses music intentionally within a therapeutic relationship with a credentialed professional to support emotional, cognitive, social, and psychological goals. It is a clinical & evidence-based practice, utilizing interventions that can address a variety of healthcare & educational goals. Music therapy may involve listening, lyric exploration, rhythm, songwriting, or improvisation. Music can help people access feeling states, memory, and regulation in ways that are immediate and deeply resonant.

Dance/Movement Therapy

Dance/movement therapy is grounded in the connection between body and mind. Through the psychotherapeutic use of dance, movement, body awareness, and embodied communication, clients can explore emotions and experiences that may be stored physically as much as mentally. This can be especially meaningful for people who feel disconnected from their bodies or who process stress somatically. 

Drama Therapy

Drama therapy is an embodied practice that is active and experiential. It uses storytelling, role play, dramatic metaphor, and improvisation to support reflection and change. It can help clients explore different perspectives, practice new ways of relating, and work through difficult experiences in a creative and contained way.

Poetry Therapy

Poetry therapy uses language, symbol, story, and creative writing to support emotional expression and meaning-making. It's use of poems, stories, lyrics, imagery in therapeutic, education, growth and community-building capacities, can facilitate healing and self-awareness. For people who connect with words, literature, journaling, or metaphor, poetry therapy can offer a powerful way to clarify inner experience and feel more understood.

Why the Conversation around Creativity Matters

One of the most compelling parts of the recent New York Times framing is that it helps move creativity out of the “nice if you have time” category and into the larger conversation about health. That shift matters.

Research and recent public-facing coverage have increasingly pointed to creativity as something that supports emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, self-expression, social connection, and overall well-being. Recent summaries of the science have also described both active arts engagement, like painting or crafting, and receptive arts engagement, like viewing art, as linked to neural and emotional processes involved in regulation and health.

In other words, creativity is not frivolous. It is functional. It helps people process, adapt, imagine, release, and reconnect.

That idea is one reason CATs Week matters so much. It reminds people that creative expression is not separate from mental health care. For many people, it is the doorway into it.

Why Art Therapy

All of the creative arts therapies offer meaningful pathways toward healing. Art therapy is often one of the most approachable entry points, resting on the tennant that mark making is a most innate human activity. There is something powerful about taking an internal experience and giving it shape outside of yourself. A color, an image, a collage, a scribble, a symbol — these can all become ways of understanding what feels difficult to name.

Art therapy can support people in:

• expressing emotions nonverbally

• exploring the experiences that shape identity and impact life transitions

• processing grief, trauma, or stress that often cannot find the "right" words

• building self-awareness around values, needs, and desires

• developing adaptive coping tools to support their nervous system

• reconnecting with creativity, curiosity, and play

An art therapist will remind you that engaging in art therapy does not require any experience or talent. The value is in the process, not the product; a process which can create enough space for people to notice what they feel, reflect on it with the support of a trained professional, and begin relating to themselves with more compassion and clarity. The American Art Therapy Association explicitly describes art therapy as a psychotherapeutic process grounded in active art-making and human experience, which is part of why it can be such a powerful complement or alternative to talk-only treatment.

CATs Week is also an invitation

Creative Arts Therapies Week is not only about professional awareness. It is also an invitation for people to consider what kind of support feels most natural and effective for them.

For some, traditional talk therapy is the right fit. For others, healing happens more fully through image, sound, movement, writing, or a combination of verbal and creative exploration. Creative arts therapies honor that people process differently and that therapy can be both clinically grounded and deeply human.

As the broader wellness conversation catches up to what creative arts therapists have long understood, this week offers a helpful reminder: creativity is not just something we do when we have extra time. It is one of the ways we care for ourselves, understand ourselves, and heal.

Ready to explore?

If you are curious about therapy that goes beyond words alone, art therapy may be a meaningful place to begin. Whether you are navigating anxiety, burnout, life transitions, grief, or simply a desire to understand yourself more deeply, creative work in therapy can offer a different kind of access to healing.

Visit our website to learn more about how art therapy works, or head to our team page to find a clinician whose approach feels like the right fit for you.