Learning art therapy is able to improve relationships between people (Shukla et al 2022. Aside from participating in sports and recreation arts and crafts activities are ways to address mental health concerns (Liu et al. 2019. Mental health is one of the impacts of residents' lives in fast-paced and developed cities (Marzukhi et al. 2020.) This systematic literature review (SLR) of 44 studies relevant to arts and crafts programs as a strategy for mental therapy aims to explore the similarities, differences, benefits and constraints pertinent to program implementation. The method of conducting this SLR refers to Khan et al (2003) guidelines, which suggest the following steps: determine the research question, choose the types of study to be included, design a search to identify those studies, review the relevance and results of the studies. The research question for this SLR is what are the similarities and differences of art therapy programs that aim to promote mental therapy? The explicit set of rules applied in this SLR are to review studies published from 2019 until 2024 using five established and open-access academic web database research tools i.e Web of Science, Science Direct, Scopus, IEEE Xplore and Emerald Insight. All databases are academic, online resources available to the researchers. For efficiency, and transparency, the researchers use Google Notebook LM, an AI tool to analyse the selected literature. The findings of the SLR highlight there is varied literature, diverse types of art activities for therapy, specified target population and different program settings implementation. The findings of the gap within the literature are useful for further research on art therapy effectiveness and practices towards an improved mental and quality of life.