The Silver Drawing Test and Draw a Story ─ Assessing Depression, Aggression, and Cognitive Skills

Art can be an invaluable means of communication. It can bypass language and impairment and allow for the expression of thoughts or feelings too difficult to communicate with words. In The Silver Drawing Test and Draw a Story, Rawley Silver draws on her years of experience using therapeutic art with hearing-impaired children, stroke patients, and others with learning disabilities or emotional disturbances. The book’s original art assessments use stimulus drawings to elicit responses that provide access to a patient’s emotions and attitudes toward themselves and others, while also testing for the ability to solve problems and convey ideas. Offering tools to assess cognitive skills that often escape detection on verbal tests of intelligence or achievement, the book helps in identifying those at risk for violent behavior or masked depression. Thoroughly updated from Silver’s earlier works, this new book includes techniques to assess aggression and depression that may lead to violence in schools and suicide among children and adolescents. It also addresses important gender and age differences, incorporating new information and updated studies, and it offers an in-depth look at the developmental procedures involved in these art assessments. As education for mental health professionals now includes art therapy more regularly, Silver has provided an invaluable resource for assessing emotional and cognitive content.

Rawley Silver, Ed.D, is the former director of the National Institute of Education project. Recognized as one of the early developers of art therapy in the United States, she is a recipient of the Honorary Life Membership Award from the American Art Therapy Association, and has authored more than seventy journal articles, book, and reports. As a nationally recognized painter, Dr Silver has been listed in Who’s Who in American Art since 1980, and has had seventeen solo exhibitions. Her web site is www.rawleysilver.com.