dance.
Mental health
Dancers from across the whole dance community experience difficulties which may impact upon their mental wellbeing. On this page you can find a summary of our research on mental health in dance which places a focuses on risk and protective factors.
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SELF COMPASSION
Dancers can often encounter various challenges and setbacks throughout their training and professional journeys. Despite this, little is known about the protective factors that can support dancers' mental health during these difficult times.
Self-compassion, which involves acknowledging one's own struggle and the desire to alleviate it, has gained increasing research interest in sport in recent years, showing promising potential as a protective aspect to bring about positive changes in athletes’ well-being and performance. However, the application of self-compassion in the context of dance remains relatively unexplored. This new research project seeks to discover more about self-compassion in dance.
We will soon be attending an international conference where this work, as well as the project on self harm in dance, will be presented. You can check out our blog post about this here.
Watch this space for further updates about this exciting new project!
SELF harm
Research suggests that dancers may be at an increased risk of mental ill-health. A particular area of concern is self-harm in dance students.
With no research investigating self-harm in young people in dance, it can be hard for dance teachers to know how to support students who might be at risk of self-harm. As a result, in this project we are collaborating with One Dance UK to focus on understanding what self-harm looks like in dance, which dance students might be at risk of self-harm, and what support dance teachers need in responding to self-harm concerns in their students.
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You can check out this blog, which highlights our research on dancer mental health that preceded this project. For a more detailed overview, read the published academic paper here.
Watch out for for further updates on this important new project.
