Picasso has a slightly different story to that of Van Gogh as he was highly affected by the events that would happen around him. For example, his younger sister died at the age of 7 due to a bacteria infection - diphtheria. One of his friends - Carles Casagemas, also a painter, committed suicide, something which affected Picasso a fair amount as they were quite good friends.
This traumatic event started off, what was known as Picasso’s Blue Period, the first painting of this period was of his dear friend.
This period went on from 1901 (the year of Casagemas’ death) until 1904. These were the years of his depression where he would show and express his feeling through his paintings which would show humans suffering mental illness, torn clothes, sad faces, hollow eyes and malnourished bodies, he was primarily screaming for help through his paintings, however, the ideas and conception of mental health were not well recognized throughout this era so no one was aware of his problems. His blue phase started by making edges bluer and then slowly became predominant within the paintings a creating a more depressive perspective, in other words, his feelings slowly started to spread within his imagery.
As seen in the image above, there is clearly something wrong with the subject, they do not look ‘well’ as well as the use of the colour blue which is seen as a sad colour in terms of symbolism. Picasso was basically painting his own feelings into these subjects which were, as said above, a cry for help, but also a way of coping with these strong emotions and the grief that he was feeling from the sad events that were happening around him. As psychiatric help was not well recognized in this era, instead of talking through his feelings, he painted through them which is a perfect example of self-help and art therapy. He would paint people that were seen as sorrowful such as beggars and those who suffer from desolation.
It seems that his art was a very useful tool in terms of getting through his depressive era, and it was likely that he was oblivious of how much it actually helped him, as already mentioned, the concept of art therapy had not yet been invented and due to his already keen interest in this practice, he was probably unaware of how much it helped him through this period.
Art therapy is proving to have been a lot more common than I first realised as it is a way of explaining and demonstrating what one is feeling through visuals instead of verbally.