The ‘art’ of supporting youth mental health
A University of Minnesota Rochester student sparks a creative arts program to support mental health in East African immigrant youth.
As an undergraduate Health Sciences student at the University of Minnesota Rochester, Bontu Ambo analyzed data from a study of a “Creativity Camp,” where young people with depression and anxiety immersed themselves in art and other creative activities.
Held in 2022 and 2023 and led by Dr. Kathryn Cullen, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences on the Twin Cities campus, the study yielded encouraging results that hit home with Ambo.
As one of the 100,000 members of the Oromo community—Minnesota’s second largest community of East African immigrants—she realized how this kind of approach could benefit Oromo youth. Working through the University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, Ambo was soon in the thick of organizing a groundbreaking Oromo Mental Health Study. Leading it were Cullen and Yuko Taniguchi, an artist and professor at the Rochester campus, who taught a course in which Ambo had learned about the Creativity Camp.
“Bontu shared that while mental health is often a stigmatized topic in the Oromo community, art is deeply woven into the culture,” Taniguchi says. “Songs, dances, clothing, and traditions vary across tribes and regions in Oromia, serving as powerful outlets for expressing emotion, preserving history, and sharing values across generations.”
Mental health through art—and some serious dancing
In April and May 2024, the Oromo Mental Health Study brought young people together for four workshops at the Oromo Community of Minnesota in St. Paul to explore their creativity and mental health.
Unlike the Creativity Camp, it did not recruit specifically for young people with depression.
Rather, “Fourteen brave and curious young people from the Oromo community joined the program to help the researchers understand how engaging in creative arts can encourage open conversations about mental health, reduce stigma in the Oromo community, and also impact their well-being,” Ambo explains.
The program opened with a self-portrait project, in which the young people formed profile images of themselves, drawing on “the things that they love, the memorable moments that shaped them, and the Darkness that feels heavy inside them,” Ambo says.
Together, she says, the young artists painted a mural of “what is missing from our world ... what they wished to add to their community.” It is called Hiddaa Hawaasaa Keenya ("The Roots of Our Community") and it appears at the top of this story. The study closed with a dance session—featuring participants’ original choreography—and an exhibit of the young people’s artworks at the University’s Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain in Minneapolis.
A promising start
“We feel that there is tremendous power in helping young people tap into their creativity and helping them to express themselves authentically,” Cullen says. “We are very interested in studying how to adapt these kinds of interventions to different populations, and this is currently an active area of our research."
Creativity Camp will be offered again this summer, including a camp focused on Native American youth.
