Art for health's sake or health for art's sake: Disentangling the bidirectional relationships between arts engagement and mental health.

ABSTRACT: Increasing evidence links arts engagement with mental health, but the directionality of the link remains unclear. Applying a novel approach to causal inference, we used nonrecursive instrumental variable models to analyze two waves of data from the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study (n = 17,927). Our findings reveal bidirectional causal relationships between arts engagement (arts participation, cultural attendance, and heritage visits) and mental health (GHQ-12 mental distress and SF-12 Mental Component Summary mental well-being). After adjusting for time 1 measures and identifying confounders, cultural attendance and heritage visits were reciprocally associated with mental distress and mental well-being, while arts participation was only reciprocally associated with mental

SUBMITTER: Mak HW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11586668 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature