The Curative Power of Art, by Peter Leyland

 

The Curative Power of Art

A Reading of Art Cure by Daisy Fancourt

This book is proof if any were needed that an engagement with the arts is good for us. The Art that the author Daisy Fancourt refers to in it belongs to several different creative areas, such as music, dance, poetry and storytelling, and she has followed the first of these throughout her life as an accomplished piano player. In her prelude to the book, she says that behaviour connected to the arts can have a big influence on our health. For example: ‘If children engage with art workshops, choirs, book clubs, dance classes, drama groups or bands they are less likely to be lonely or develop behavioural problems…’ Nor is this book just a speculative account. Throughout it the author tells us about her engagement with specialist academic teams in areas of Psychobiology and Epidemiology, for which she is a Professor at UCL, researching how biological processes relate to human experience such as the emotions. She also refers to herself in an autoethnographic manner during the book such as her very moving account of the birth of her daughter, Daphne

 

When I picked up Art Cure, I was already a keen student of how the arts can transform our lives. I had in 2018 at the Annual Conference of ESREA (European Society for Research on the Education of Adults) delivered a paper at the University of Turin on the theme of ‘Togetherness and its discontents…’ My paper was about “Connecting with Our Creative Selves” and discussed in some detail how a government report in 2017 had been produced in England advocating the importance of following ‘The Arts’ for an individual’s health and happiness. This 200-page report Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing was supported by 16 notable people among whom were Lord Layard founder of Action for Happiness, Grayson Perry, a well-known artist, Eva Okwonga Board member, Mind and Music, and Deborah Bull, then assistant Principal at Kings College, London.

 

Be that as it may, the enthusiasm with which I first encountered the report has long since dissipated, and so I welcomed Daisy Fancourt's book and the opportunity to follow her well-researched account of how the arts can provide a curative process for a variety of medical conditions. First, she puts a great emphasis on the importance of music in our lives. She describes with her own education having to choose between the arts and the sciences and how, although she originally chose the arts at Oxford University because of her piano playing skills, she switched to the sciences and found herself working first at Birmingham Children's Hospital and then Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital on neurology, cardiology, oncology and palliative care wards. At the end of this stage of her career, she obtained what she describes as a dream job: ‘designing and implementing a performing arts programme at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London'. This led, through a range of further career steps with a team of fellow researchers of which she speaks highly, to the eventual writing of this book. I found her account of how she got there absolutely fascinating. 

 

Trying to isolate one of the ideas that Daisy Fancourt uses as a trigger to Art Cure, I decided that the best example is ‘singing’ because this is something that I have myself discovered during the last two years. She uses a case study of a character known as Shai to illustrate her point about the importance of music. Shai wanted to become a lawyer and was successful, but life events such as the serious illness of her mother made her change track. She attended a summer course about vocal technique lessons in music, and from there her ideas of what she wanted to do in life changed until she became immersed in and achieved peak experiences in music, moving on to songwriting. When her mother died, she took this skill further and while retaining her interest in law she began recording songs and touring with them. In further correspondence Shai describes herself to Daisy as not stuck any more but ‘fulfilled’. More examples of research into singing as part of the “art cure” follow this example. One is of a group of mothers who suffered from post-natal depression. The group met every week for ten weeks learning songs to sing with their babies. They also performed music themselves and wrote songs about the experiences of motherhood. Within six weeks Daisy Fancourt found a 35% decrease in post natal depression symptoms among the group. 

 

Joining a choir is recommended in the book and singing is shown to be an excellent way to aid good health as it encourages exercises like deep breathing which add to this. I must apply the idea to my own life for during a lengthy period when I was suffering from severe insomnia, with the encouragement of my wife I became part of a local singing group. For two years now I have had a weekly experience of collaborating with about thirty people in singing songs from popular shows such as The Phantom of the Opera, Scottish sea shanties, a range of African folk music, and songs that the teacher has composed herself. The benefits that I receive from this activity I have found to be remarkable. Our teacher, Lucy, generally begins the classes with a variety of exercises, including deep breathing, telling us that: ‘a choir that breathes together sings together’. As an adult education tutor myself, I have noted her skill in creating from a very disparate group - I for one have no knowledge of reading music – a choir of what I will describe as quietly beautiful people joining together in something that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. At Christmas we performed a range of songs to the residents of a local care home. 

 

Daisy Fancourt gives us further examples of the power of music which she relates to her own experience in some detail. She describes the premature birth of her baby daughter Daphne, and how at the time she had recalled studies of how exposure to music improved the health of babies in Neonatal Intensive Care Units. When Daphne developed meningitis, Daisy and her husband Tom were in constant attendance and when she contracted other infections, Daisy agreed with hospital nursing staff that dressed in PPE she could stand inside the door of the unit singing to her: ‘Even though I couldn’t touch her, I could use my voice as a point of connection.’ 

 

Daisy tells us she wrote this chapter of the book on the day before Daphne’s second birthday and in this way, she draws the reader into the book. We are not baffled by the science, which is considerable, but we are able to relate to the issues through which she is promoting the arts as a cure. In a later section on Arts for sex education, for example, she tells us about how a US TV series called East Los High which became immensely popular resulted in the improvement of condom use amongst young adults. This illustrated, she says: ‘the extraordinary power of storytelling’.

 

Storytelling and poetry are important to me and during the past few years I have been considering what aspects of literature can be part of a healing process for mental illnesses. I found a connection to this in Art Cure when In Chapter 6 the author brings several ideas together through an evolutionary theory about bonding which interested her. Grooming as a bonding behaviour, she says, has been replaced by other forms of social interaction based around the arts like singing, dance, music making and storytelling. This leads to expressive writing and she goes on to describe a study in New Zealand which showed that this form of writing led to both supportive changes in emotions and an improvement in the inflammatory phase of the healing of physical wounds. Towards the end of the book, she mentions the benefits of reading poetry and quotes Darwin as saying: ‘If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.’ She gives an example of poetry that can uplift us when she mentions “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver.

 

This poem is a great favourite of mine and as one-time performance poet I can vouch for the emotional healing power of poetry. It is a form of expressive writing which many of us can relate to, and this brings me back to the link between Art Cure and the government report on The Arts for Health and Wellbeing which I mentioned earlier. In the report “Poems on the Underground” is mentioned in some detail and this year its 40^th anniversary was noted in a recent Guardian editorial. The idea of posting poems in underground carriages next to the tube maps was conceived by Judith Chernaik who is quoted as saying: ‘What we’ve been told repeatedly is that people love the poems because they offer a moment of quiet reflection, they are pleasurable, consoling, illuminating.’ Last month writers like Rachel Boast and Blake Morrison are reported to have featured, and there was also a haiku by the 18th-century Japanese Poet Kobayashi Issa. Poetry can give us memorable states of being: in her case study of Shai Daisy Fancourt talks about ‘flow’ and I was reminded of Csikszentmihalyi's theory that we can achieve 'epiphanies' when we are involved deeply in something to the elimination of everything else. 

 

There is much more in this book than I have mentioned here. In a coda to the book Daisy Fancourt says the we should experience art much as we experience food and gives us a list of ten principles that we might follow while experiencing the arts: eg. 1. Crash diets don't work, she says so don't binge on the arts but take it slowly; 5. Diversity is key so don't just rely on one activity. Previously my own diet consisted mainly of literature so now I am pleased that I have been able to add music. 10. Identify your Chicken Soup: If you're feeling low or unwell, she says, we should plan what books or music might lift our mood. I recall in December reading Raymond Williams's Border Country when I was grieving after my brother-in-law's sudden death. 

All in all Daisy Fancourt's theme resonated with me deeply and added weight to previous studies I have made. Her often passionate account of the research that she has undertaken on the importance of Art Cure showed me that there is an enormous amount of evidence that art can provide a cure for many of life's trials and tribulations and can also increase the happinesses of our lives. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

References and further reading

All-Party Parliamentary Group (2017) Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing Inquiry Report

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002) Flow: The classic work on how to achieve happiness 

Fancourt, D. (2026) Art Cure: The Science of How the ArtsTransform Our Health  

'How art can transform your life' by Daisy Fancourt in The Guardian Wednesday 7th January 2026

'Public art' Editorial in The Guardian Tuesday 20th January 2026

Leyland, P. (2018) 'Togetherness - in times off conflict can we reconnect with our creative selves?' Paper presented to the ESREA conferences on 'Togetherness' and its discontents, Turin, March

Oliver. M. (1990) "The Summer Day"

Williams, R. (1960) Border Country

Cover Design for Art Cure by Luke Bird