Paint the Pain: Investigating the physiological, psychological, and social impacts of a visual art creation on individuals living with chronic pain

After receiving consent, participants will be randomised into an intervention or a control group. Our randomisation approach will be impacted by the number of participants recruited from the STEPs Program. o If we are successful in recruiting 20 patients after attending one of the monthly STEPs programs, participants will be randomly allocated by the research team to either intervention or control group, using a computer-generated sequence and a 1:1 allocation ratio. o If we are not successful in recruiting 20 patients from one STEPs program, we aim to use the quasi-randomisation approach. That is, the first group of participants recruited from the first STEPs program will be allocated to the intervention group and participants recruited from the next STEPs program will be allocated to the control group. This approach will not extend the waiting time of patients to receive their pain assessment and treatment, should we not succeed in recruiting 20 participants via the first STEPs program. After randomisation/group allocation, the intervention group will undergo five sessions of art intervention (3hrs/1 session per week) detailed below. Intervention Group Participants randomised/allocated to the art intervention group will be asked to attend five sessions of art observation and creation at the Art Gallery of NSW (3hrs per session, 1 session per week) for over five weeks. To monitor adherence, participants will be contacted by our research assistant two days prior to the session and will be sent a text message requesting to confirm their attendance 24 hours prior to the session. The first hour of the session, will be allocated to observation and discussion of 3 art works at the art gallery of NSW. This session will be guided by two artists at the gallery. The second hour of the session is allocated to creation of the art works guided by an artist, and two researchers experienced in the field of arts and health, and a rehabilitation counselling researcher. During these sessions, participants will be guided to explore and communicate their pain experiences through the creation of visual artworks including each individual's pain and its impact on their well-being, personal and social life. Participants may also depict their 'ideal' self and life if they could 'tame' their pain. Participants will be guided to share and discuss these art creations and experiences with family, others with chronic pain, and with community members. The themes for the five art making sessions will be decided upon iteratively by the research team from the following list: 1. Express your pain in paint. Explore any of its dimensions. 2. Paint yourself with your pain in your present life. 3. Paint the self you hope to be/ you could be in relation to moving beyond pain /taming pain 4. Paint all the places the pain has come from or are connected with 5. What do you need most in order to live with pain? 6. Paint your future self and how you would like to live 7. Paint what is meaningfully connected to your pain – in any way. The final hour of the art-making sessions will be a group discussion and reflection on the art creation process, effectively a group interview, conducted jointly by team members, a rehabilitation counsellor and a qualitative arts and health researcher. This group interview is similar to a ‘focus group’ and is understood partly as ‘action research’ in which reflections prompted by the discussion may influence their experiences in the subsequent session.