Using creativity and the arts to promote mental health in youth living with HIV in South Africa

Access to adolescent-friendly, culturally relevant and stigma-free mental health support is essential for reducing the long-term psychological, social and economic challenges of mental illness of youth living with HIV (YLWH). Now more than ever, innovative task-shifting interventions, through which non-mental health professionals provide mental health support to YLWH, need to be explored and supported. While many of these have considered shifting tasks to nurses, tapping into the wisdom and inspiration from artists in the community where YLWH are living could represent a novel and potentially powerful task-shifting strategy. In this opinion piece, we propose that the arts could be explored in future studies as a promising avenue for mental health interventions for YLWH in South Africa. Better Together is a peer-support intervention for youth living with chronic illness, which has been published previously by our team. As part of the discussion, we share feedback about the creative arts component of the Better Together groups provided by Better Together participants themselves. Overall, this feedback yielded several key insights which further underscore the idea that providing youth with opportunities to engage in creative arts in a group setting may represent a promising platform for addressing mental health in YLWH in South Africa. Specifically, we learned that (1) youth enjoyed the opportunity to engage creatively, (2) these experiences helped them connect with others, (3) they gained new insights and perspectives about themselves and their lives, and (4) they experienced a positive impact on their mood and well-being.