This course follows on from the 2022-2023 semester 1 course in Music and Creative Arts in the Community. The focus is now upon how a ”community” approach to creative arts can help support children with mental health challenges.

There is a global crisis in children’s mental health. One of the reasons is the aftermath of the Covid epidemic. On average, during the pandemic, 50-60% of children in the UK showed symptoms related to trauma (C19PRC https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/psychology-consortium-covid19). This picture was replicated internationally (Xiong et al, Journal of Affective Disorders, December 2020, 55-64)

The pandemic was then followed by war. We do yet have reliable figures for levels of trauma among children in Ukraine, but we know with reasonable certainty that two-thirds of children under 15 have had to flee besieged areas in Eastern Ukraine, that roughly 28% of Ukrainian children have been separated from a family member and that 24% have experienced some form of shelling pr bombing (https://www.eifoundation.org/partners/ukraine-childrens-action-project/).

Support services internationally are failing to cope with this accumulation of mental health problems. In the UK, for example, there are a quarter of a million children in need of mental health care that health services have been unable to support (The House, UK Parliament 2023). In Ukraine, mental health-related services are under severe pressure.

Creative arts provide many ways of addressing trauma and other mental health challenges. There is an army of potential practitioners among artists, arts educators and psychologists and others interested in the field, that could offer significant support to health services.

The objective of this course is to present both the theoretical and scientific background and practical examples of how such an “action” could be implemented.

It may seem strange to offer this as a university course, but in times of difficulty, it is important that science and scholarship serve human needs. If a movement  for Music, Creative Arts and Children’s mental health were to take root in Ukraine, there would be the opportunity for Ukraine to lead a world movement.