Graduate Diploma in Creative Arts Therapies

Murdoch University

The Graduate Diploma in Creative Arts Therapies will teach you how the creative arts – from drama and movement to painting and poetry – can offer healing benefits when navigating difficult personal experiences, trauma and general mental health.

Artists have been using art to express themselves for centuries – Vincent Van Gogh famously used his art to cope with mental illness throughout his life, and Edvard Munch is widely regarded to have inspired a whole movement of expressionism in art connecting to mood and internal emotional life.

Modern science and psychology has helped to uncover the benefits of creative arts in promoting positive mental health outcomes. There is growing evidence about the power the artistic process has to help us connect with emotions and experiences, and by doing so face life’s dilemmas.

Learn how expression through the arts can be used to enhance the therapeutic process by using a person-centred framework. You’ll learn the newly-emerging theory in this area of counselling, combined with hands-on experience that will build your counselling skills.

While this course has proven beneficial for counsellors to work with clients to express themselves, if you’re a teacher, social worker, chaplain, psychologist, or youth worker, you’ll also be able to apply the skills you learn in your current role. Students who complete the Graduate Diploma in Creative Arts Therapies may apply for admission to the Masters of Counselling and will be exempt from the units already completed which are common to both degrees.