Elements of Drawing and Depression among Adolescents in Kerala, South India: An Explorative Study using A Person Picking a Mango from a Tree L. S. S. Manickam and V. Sajani Advances in art based assessments in art therapy in clinical settings led to the development of objective measurements of various elements in drawing. The present study was aimed at assessing the elements that are related to depression manifested in the drawing task of “Person Picking a Mango from a Tree” (PPMT). The sample consisted of 60 adolescents in two groups-the depressive group of 30 with high scores of depression and 30 with low scores of depression, who served as the non-depressive group. The PPMT drawings were assessed using Formal Elements of Art Therapy Scale (FEATS) by two raters who had established high inter- rater reliability. The two groups had significant difference on 3 of the 14 subscales. Art based assessments had formed part of clinician’s armature of tools since the time Goodenough (1926) developed Draw-A- Person test (DAP). Later several other variants of art based assessments like Draw House- Tree -Person Test (Buck, 1964) and Human Figure Drawing (Kahn & Jones, 1965) were introduced. In India, Pathak (2002) had used Draw-A- Man Test in the 1960’s to assess intelligence. Fairy Tale Test (Coulacoglou & Kline, 1995) was recently introduced in India (Sanyal and Dasgupta, 2011). “The Picking A Mango from a Tree” is a projective test and assessed different emotional states such as aggression, anxiety, depression and morality. From a clinical perspective some of these tools are being used as projective tests in order to assess the clinical variables. On the other hand as the field of art therapy developed, more art based tools were introduced and assessed from different modalities and Silver Drawing Test (SDT) of cognition and emotion was one of them (Silver, 2003). Another art based task that was developed by Gantt (1990) is the Person Picking an Apple from a Tree (PPAT). PPAT has been extensively used in art therapy and art based assessments. PPAT was introduced in India recently and was assessed for its cultural adaptability (Kruthi & Manickam, 2014). Adult population as well as adolescents in South Asian countries tend to somatise depressive mood and communicate their low mood through their bodily symptoms than verbally reporting the affect (Grover et al. 2013). Identifying depression among adolescents at an early stage facilitates successful treatment. Therefore art based tasks may be effectively engaged to identify affective states of depression, aggression and anxiety (Sajani & Manickam, 2000). PPAT involves a simple task of drawing and colouring and it may help children and adolescents to express themselves since they may view the task as ‘interesting’. However when PPAT was administered to children and adolescents in India, the participants reported their difficulty in drawing an ‘apple tree’ since many of them had not seen the tree (Kruthi & Manickam, 2014). Therefore Kruthi et al. (2014) recommended ‘Mango’ tree instead of ‘Apple’ tree to be used in Indian setting and the task was to ‘Draw a Person Picking a Mango from a Tree’ (PPMT). While the projective drawings were being assessed through subjective measures, Gantt (1990) developed Formal Elements of Art Therapy Scale (FEATS), a rating system for assessing specific variables based on the drawing tasks given to the participants, L. S. S. Manickam, Ph.D., MMSP, Professor in Clinical Psychology, JSS University, Mysore (India). Lssmanickam @gmail.com, and V. Sajani, M.Phil CP, Clinical Psychologist, District Hospital, Pathanamthitta District, Kerala sajaniv@rediffmail.com Key words: PPAT, PPMT, FEATS, Art based assessments, Depression SIS J. Proj. Psy. & Ment. Health (2016) 23:41-46