CARE THROUGH ART: THE PERSPECTIVES OF ART THERAPY FOR THE ELDERLY

Abstract

Aging is a process that is often overcome in our society, even with the awareness that we are all subject to this phase of the life cycle and that the world's population is increasingly getting older. It is therefore necessary to compensate for the way in which health care for the elderly is viewed and carried out, especially when taking into account the multiple forms of presentation of the elderly, which are expressed in different ways, depending on the construction of the subjectivity of each person. subject. Art Therapy emerges in this context as a therapeutic tool that can be used in the work of promoting health and quality of life for the elderly, as it is a broad resource that can be used in the most diverse ways. The objective of this work is to investigate the contributions of using Art Therapy for the elderly. This objective was achieved through the construction of an integrative review of the literature, where articles were selected from databases based on the descriptors “Art therapy”, “Elderly”, “Quality of life” and “Health Promotion”, in Portuguese languages and English, published in the last ten years. Eight articles were selected, two in Portuguese and six in English, produced between 2014 and 2021, indexed in the LILACS (1), IBCT (1) and MEDLINE (5) databases. We highlight these articles as contributions to Art Therapy applied to the person elderly woman in her different trained contexts. As a result of this research, we can find several pieces of evidence that point to Art Therapy for the elderly as a therapeutic tool that contributes to physical, psychological and social aspects, which, consequently, can promote quality of life and health for an elderly person.