Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing

Karen Baikie is a clinical psychologist and postdoctoral research fellow with the Black Dog Institute and School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales (Black Dog Institute, University of New South Wales, The Villa, Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick NSW 2031, Australia. E-mail: k.baikie{at}unsw.edu.au). She completed her PhD in the use of expressive writing in the Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney. Her interests are in the application of expressive writing for different clinical populations and in working therapeutically with survivors of trauma, as well as general adult clinical psychology. Kay Wilhelm is a consultant psychiatrist in consultation liaison psychiatry at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, and the Mood Disorders Unit, Black Dog Institute, where she is also project leader for the General Practitioner Education Program. She is a clinical Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. She has a long-standing interest in depression, especially gender issues and psychosocial risk factors, brief psychotherapy for depression and self-harm, as well as primary care and general hospital psychiatry. K.B. is supported by National Health and Medical Research Council Program Grant 222708.

Writing about traumatic, stressful or emotional events has been found to result in improvements in both physical and psychological health, in non-clinical and clinical populations. In the expressive writing paradigm, participants are asked to write about such events for 15–20 minutes on 3–5 occasions. Those who do so generally have significantly better physical and psychological outcomes compared with those who write about neutral topics. Here we present an overview of the expressive writing paradigm, outline populations for which it has been found to be beneficial and discuss possible mechanisms underlying the observed health benefits. In addition, we suggest how expressive writing can be used as a therapeutic tool for survivors of trauma and in psychiatric settings.

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