[Art as a Living Process: Creativity and Mental Health depicted by An Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Analysis of...

Artistic creativity maintains complex and bidirectional relationships with mental health, simultaneously reflecting psychological vulnerability and serving as a powerful vehicle for emotional regulation, symbolization, and resilience. In parallel, large language models (LLMs) are emerging as innovative tools to support the qualitative analysis of complex subjective processes. This case study presents the longitudinal trajectory of an emerging artist who is also a psychiatrist and lives with a chronic autoimmune disease, documenting her creative process throughout the development of a series of mixed-media artworks. The objective was to explore the creative process as a transformational space within the context of chronic illness, in which art functions both as a lever for resilience and as a means of identity reconfiguration. Twenty-six reflective audio recordings were collected over a six-month period, transcribed, and analyzed using a hybrid qualitative approach combining inductive thematic analysis with artificial intelligence-assisted analysis (GPT-4.0) within a secure local environment. Seven central themes emerged, conceptualizing art as an existential, dialogical, and embodied process mobilized in response to illness, invisibility, mortality, and identity-related challenges. The analysis highlights a progressive cognitive, affective, and metacognitive transformation, suggesting a trajectory of post-traumatic growth. This study illustrates the integrative potential of artistic practice supported by reflective narration and AI-assisted analysis, while also underscoring both the contributions and the limitations of LLMs as complementary tools in qualitative.