Start: a creative approach to mental health care

Start Manchester is an arts‐based, face‐to‐face mental health service within the emergent field of arts in mental health. This article describes its work and demonstrates how it uses art in a health‐focused way. While the article refers to some of the literature that explores how and why the experience of art can be beneficial to mental health, it is explicitly written from a practitioner perspective. As such, it foregrounds the thoughts/feelings of the service users (referred to throughout as students) about their engagement with the project, in order to refine our understandings of the links between creative practices and mental health.