Expressive art therapy for psychosis: A multiple case study

•The participants were capable of exploring their psychosis through art.•They described art therapy as helpful in coping with the psychosis.•Existential and spiritual issues turned out to important topics.•One of the participants found her spiritual truth by means of her artistic work. A number of researchers have pointed to the value of art therapy for patients suffering from psychosis. Even so, it still remains unclear how and why art therapy works. This article describes the course of an art therapy group for five women suffering from psychotic disorder and their statements of the usefulness of the therapy. The group focused on exploring the patient's psychotic experience expressed through her artwork. Hopefully, this study will contribute to deepen the understanding of the working mechanisms of art therapy. A multiple single case study where the group process, the artwork produced and the semi-structured interviews of the patients were analysed qualitatively. All the patients met our preposition that they would be capable of exploring their psychotic experience through art therapy. Two of the participants described how they, by the help of art therapy, were able to control their psychosis. The rest reported an improvement in mastering their psychosis. One of the participants described that the exploratory artistic work had opened a new ability for her to distinguish between her helpful spiritual experiences and her hallucinations and religious delusions connected to her psychotic experience.