Drawing with care: a critique of an arts-based intervention in perinatal psychiatry

SUMMARY This commentary responds to a case study of a drawing group on a perinatal psychiatric ward, framing it as a threshold practice: one that invites creative presence between clinician and mother, between symptom and symbol. The commentary highlights the therapeutic potential of shared non-verbal creative acts, but points to the potential for aesthetic coercion and the ethical tensions that arise when clinicians step into aesthetic space alongside patients. It argues that arts interventions in mental health require neither romanticisation nor reductive measurement, but a critical and generative mode of engagement attuned to thresholds, relationships and the fragile work of recovery.