How Art Can Benefit People With Alzheimer's Disease: Art as a Tool for Diagnosing Retrogression

Art and mental illness often reveal a direct and indirect relationship. For example, depending upon the stage of Alzheimer’s disease in patients, words may become problematic. When at a loss for words, effective communication by or with these patients, becomes progressively difficult.

Art, directly or indirectly, can be an important part of ongoing communication, touching and changing their outlook on life and ultimately, their lives.  

Ruth Abraham, in her book entitled, “When Words Have Lost Their Meaning: Alzheimer's Patients Communicate through Art” suggests that “people who can no longer use words can express their deepest feelings through the symbolic language of art.”

Perhaps one might suggest that art with its diversity, complexity and multiplicity of expression, is an important aspect in the mental, emotional and spiritual realms of the human psyche during all stages of life, including mental illness. It can also affect the function in the physical realm of an artistic patient with Alzheimer’s disease. 

How can art benefit people with Alzheimer’s disease?

“Art therapy draws on the rich resources of a lifetime - the temperament, emotions, experiences, and memories that make up one's internal world - that are still present for many years of the disease and provide material for profound communion.”

The article, “Self-Portraits Chronicle a Descent Into Alzheimer’s” by Denise O’Grady, quotes a neurologist, Dr. Bruce Miller from the University of California.  

“Alzheimer’s affects the right parietal lobe in particular, which is important for visualizing something internally and then putting it onto a canvas,” Dr. Miller said. “The art becomes more abstract, the images are blurrier and vague, more surrealistic. Sometimes there’s use of beautiful, subtle color.”

While more research will be necessary in terms of the benefits of art therapy for Alzheimer’s disease patients, it becomes increasingly evident that art can be a useful, diagnostic tool in terms of measuring the retrogression of mental faculties.

The use of concepts is an eastern pathway of communication, as opposed to the more common western pathway of words.  Words help to explain concepts, but when words have been forgotten or erased, concepts or mental pictures may still be alive in the mind of a patient with Alzheimer’s disease.

For example, an elderly man with Alzheimer’s disease may not be able to relate to the words needed to explain a bright red, sports car, but he still may be able to relate to the artistic expression of that same car. He may even try to draw the sports car. The same man may not be able to communicate his desire for money needed for a haircut, but he can relate to the artistic concept of a wallet holding a two-dollar bill.       

An important benefit of art for people with Alzheimer’s disease has to do with the function of the right side of the brain versus the function of the left side. While the sands of time slip away in Alzheimer’s disease revealing evidence of a decline in mental health, it is not always immediately evident which sections of the sand in the sandbox are disappearing. Even while the function on one side of the brain is declining and thus, that side of the brain is showing increasing evidence of malfunction, the other side of the brain may still be functional. Perhaps it always functioned better than the other side of the brain.

This door to discovery about how art can benefit people with Alzheimer’s disease is still open to further study. In the meantime, encouraging patients with Alzheimer’s disease to explore their artistic abilities, can help relieve some of their frustrations and give them a sense of worth, as well as help researchers discover new answers.