This book re-examines the common view that a high level of individual creativity often correlates with a heightened risk of mental illness.

This book argues that some aspects of mental health practice have become mechanical, joyless and uninspiring, leading to a loss of creativity and wellbeing. A high level of wellbeing is essential to mental health and contemporary mental health care – and creativity is at the heart of this. A greater awareness of everyday creativity, the arts and creative approaches to mental health practice, learning and leadership can help us reinvent and reinvigorate mental health care. This, combined with a clearer understanding of the complex concept of wellbeing, can enable practitioners to adopt fresh perspectives and roles that can enrich their work. Creativity and wellbeing are fundamental to reducing occupational stress and promoting professional satisfaction. Introducing a new model of creative mental health care combined with recommendations for wellbeing, Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental Health Practice is a practical, evidence-based book for students, practitioners and researchers in mental health nursing and related disciplines.

This book is about redefining the value to health of creativity. Creativity derives from biological changes during human evolution as a tool that is needed for survival. The successful use of creativity generates feelings of pleasure and self-esteem that are beneficial to health. In particular, it can help depression. Current values do not give adequate importance to creativity, and the author challenges these values in this book. The book contains contributed chapters on a theory of creativity as an innate capacity, the therapeutic benefits of creativity, factors that encourage or inhibit creativity and current research on these, and accounts of creativity both as individual projects and as groupwork.

Previously neglected, more and more affect and creativity is recognized as an area that is important and exciting area to investigate. This book presents the very latest ideas and research by leaders in the field about the role of affect in the creative process. Affect, Creative Experience and Psychological Adjustment is an arena where new theories and concepts can be presented, research findings compared and discussed, methodological issues debated, and future research outlined. Key questions in affect and creativity focus on identifying specific affective processes that are most important in creativity, discovering the underlying mechanisms that account for the relationships between affect and creativity, exploring differential effects of various types of affect, such as positive and negative affect, on creativity and understanding how these things relate to psychological adjustment. As with any new line of research investigation, there is a fermenting of ideas, speculations, research findings, hunches, methodological issues and tests of theoretical models that evolves into a clear vision of heuristic theoretical models and identification of the most important research questions. This book contributes to that process in the area of affect and creativity.