Can art foster emotional health?

I do not believe we were put on this earth to be happy, nor to be mentally healthy either (all of us are more or less loopy). What we can aspire to is an approximation to what I call emotional health – and unlike happiness, emotional health is a meaningful, realistic goal which art can play an important part in achieving. So what exactly does emotional health consist of? In my book I boil it down into six components: living in the present; two-way, fluid communication; insight; playfulness; vivacity; and authenticity.

Living in the present means you experience the world as first-hand and immediate; you are, as the sports commentators put it, ‘in the zone’. Fluid communication implies that you do not get either ‘jammed on transmit’ or ‘jammed on receive’. You live without flooding or dominating others, nor are you flooded or dominated. Insight into your own behaviour gives you that nectar of the soul, the capacity for choice, and therefore, for change. Such self-awareness is what sets us apart from other animals. Playfulness and vivacity mean you have retained a child-like capacity to find pleasure in life and to be spontaneous. Finally, authenticity implies that you feel real rather than false. You are comfortable in your skin: you do not wish you could be someone else, nor do you look down on others for not being like you. 
None of us are emotionally healthy at all times, in all these ways – in fact most of us achieve it only in some of the respects outlined above, and only some of the time. But art can offer many useful correctives and suggestions to help us along the way.

Perhaps that’s because, more or less unwittingly, a great deal of art deals with the question of how to become more emotionally healthy. In those arts which contain narrative, the plot often recounts a journey towards or away from it. Whatever the medium – theatre, literary fiction, the plastic arts – consuming art can bring insight into ourselves.

When we watch King Lear and he bids himself to ‘See, see more clearly’ as he blunders from one tragic mistake to another, we can know how he feels and gain consolation. But more than this, we can get clues as to how we are failing to see our own lives more clearly.
Looking in wonder into the painter’s eyes in Van Gogh’s self-portrait in the Musee D’Orsay in Paris, we feel a chill and may consider how this fate could await us unless we change our lives. We grasp the enormity of madness and are awed by the painter’s skill in exposing his own.

The novels of Jane Austen are an exploration of wherein authenticity may lie. Even the most psychopathic of politician or CEO may learn how to be more real and true from reading them – if only in order to counterfeit it.
Equally, art can inspire playfulness. Nearly all the films of Mike Leigh contain characters like the driving instructor in Happy Go Lucky who model for us how to use humour to lighten life’s burden.

There are no equals to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych for inspiring us to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ in our daily lives. For at least a while after reading it, most people would find it hard not to live a little more in the present.

Popular culture can be equally successful at fostering emotionally health traits. The Wire offers a positively Shakespearian exploration of how to stay alive, playful and vivacious in the face of extreme adversities, while also evincing a very humanist sympathy for each individual’s motivation. Its calibration of the relativity of moral universes has an almost Tolstoyan precision. 

What matters in seeking emotional health is that you find ways to ring your bell. Life is not a rehearsal and the arts can help us to realise that at the deepest levels.