The healing mechanism and practical exploration of art design in the field of mental health care

Abstract Background Schizophrenia is a serious chronic mental disorder. Patients often show positive symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, as well as negative symptoms such as emotional apathy and social withdrawal. Art therapy, with its advantages such as non-invasiveness and humanistic care, has gradually become an important supplementary means of mental health care. However, most existing research focuses on the application of broad art therapy and lacks customized intervention exploration based on the pathological characteristics of schizophrenia patients. Based on this, the research aims to verify the actual effect of art therapy in improving patients’ mental symptoms through quantitative data analysis. Methods A randomized controlled trial was conducted to select 60 patients with stable schizophrenia from a certain mental health center as the research subjects. They were randomly and equally divided into the intervention group and the control group. There were no statistically significant differences between the two groups in terms of gender, age, disease duration, and core scale scores before intervention (p.05), and they were comparable. Among them, the intervention group received 12 weeks of art design intervention on the basis of routine care, color perception and emotional expression training from 1 to 4 weeks, three-dimensional handicraft creation and cognitive reconstruction from 5 to 8 weeks, and therapeutic space interaction and social practice from 9 to 12 weeks, while the control group only received routine rehabilitation care. The research was conducted based on the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) and the Social Disability Screening Schedule. The main indicators were SDSS and Serum Cortisol Detection (SCD). Data were collected from the two groups of patients before the intervention (T0) and after the intervention (T1), respectively. Paired t-tests and independent sample t-tests were performed using SPSS 26.0 software. Results The specific experimental results are shown in Table 1. It can be seen from Table 1 that all the indicators of the intervention group are significantly better than those of the control group. Among them, the total PANSS score of the intervention group decreased from 89.65 ± 10.31 in the T0 stage to 62.34 ± 8.10 after art therapy, with a decrease of 30.46%, and it was statistically significant (p.001). The decrease range of SDSS score (54.02%) was significantly higher than that of the control group (26.12%), while SCD decreased to 385.68 ± 45.20 after the intervention, which was significantly lower than 497.85 ± 56.79 of the control group. Moreover, both SDSS and SCD in the intervention group were statistically significant (p.001). Discussion Research has confirmed that immersive art design intervention has a significant therapeutic effect on patients with stable schizophrenia. Its therapeutic mechanism involves physiological, psychological and social dimensions, providing a scalable solution for the rehabilitation care of schizophrenia patients.